Harmonic helps investors interrogate the startup searches of their wildest dreams

Siri, show me the fintech companies, founded in the past two years, that have not grown in the past year but have increased their workforce by 100% in during the same period; and can it be founded by Stanford alumni whose Twitter traction has grown at least 50% in the past six months?

This is Harmonic's vision; Well, only if you replace Siri with Harmonic's text-to-start search tool. The data platform, built by co-founders Bryan Casey and Max Ruderman, believes it can help executives uncover the next big startups without hundreds of hours of manual research and research.

Harmonic is a more specific version of its main competitors, Crunchbase and PitchBook, which aggregate and organize data from private startups. “We go out and look at every nook and cranny of the web where there might be information about companies and we take that structured and unstructured data and figure out how to merge it into a canonical representation of a company,” Ruderman told TechCrunch. .

Harmonic's aggregation differencing, according to Ruderman, is the intelligence it uses to help identify the most accurate public data for certain domains, then merges those sources to develop the "most accurate representation and latest at any time".< /p>

Harmonic joins a group of other startups trying to make business more data-driven, transparent, and fair. In theory, algorithmic investing protects against investors' preconceptions and puts emotions aside. Fintech unicorn Clearco and venture capital firm SignalFire have spent years implementing data-driven investment processes, joined by AngelList and Hum Capital.

In a landscape where investors are relearning discipline, data seems safe. But, as other solutions matured, the cleanliness and reliability of said data came into question. (One founder even pranked once, indicating that Andreessen Horowitz was an investor in his startup on Crunchbase; when other investors piled in looking to put money in his upstart, he explained that it was a joke to show the poor quality of data on the platform, reports Bloomberg).

Ruderman admitted that data reliability and consistency is one of the toughest problems to solve, and that their strategy is a big differentiator for them. “We are able to keep data fresh at scale and merge fragmented fragments of structured and unstructured data from across the web with confidence,” Ruderman said, adding that his primary measure of success is a score. internal they use which captures freshness, inventory and taxonomy.

When asked for more details on how they gain freshness, Ruderman didn't share many details (and given that this is a competitive moat, I'm not too surprised by this). He also said that prices will change as the product evolves, but currently the startup charges fees for licensing and API usage.

Ruderman's experience adds color to why he's confident in a better way to search. The co-founder had been at Google for about six and a half years – his last role being as a senior software engineer on a research team that was building tools to help Google do large-scale UX research and design. ladder. Previously, he studied behavioral economics within the human operations department, technical infrastructure within the business intelligence team, machine learning within the finance team, and ultimately research. /p>

So far, his leadership and the company behind him have attracted Harmonic at least 150 customers, including SaaS startups such as Brex, Vouch, Notion, and Carta, and venture capitalists such as Floodgate, a16z and Accel. Some of these early adopters even became the startup's biggest investors. Harmonic today announced that it has closed a $23 million Series A funding round led by Sozo Ventures, with participation from Craft Ventures, which led its $7 million funding round last year. Floodgate, another client, was Harmonic's first investor.

"By creating a really powerful discovery tool in venture capital, it allows capital to flow to more innovation in a more efficient way...if we bring that to the sales teams, it allows the sales teams to 'to provide their service and move forward at the right time," Ruderman said. "And then ultimately, we want to make sure that talent can find startups that match their...