How to get your business listed on Crunchbase

The problem: your buyer asks a chatbot, and your company is not in the answer

A buyer types "best payroll software for a 20 person agency in Bangalore" into ChatGPT or Perplexity. The answer comes back with five names, a short line about each, and a few links. Your company is not one of the five. You check your website analytics and see nothing, because no click ever happened. The decision was made inside the chat window.

When an assistant builds that kind of answer it leans on pages that are structured, factual and about companies. Directory and database profiles fit that shape well. A company database profile gives a name, a one line description, a location, a founding year, a size band and a website link, all in the same order for every company. That is cheap for a model to read and cheap to quote.

Crunchbase is one of those databases. A profile there is free to create, so for most founders it is one of the lower effort things on the list. It is not a magic switch. It is one line of evidence about your company that sits on a site other than your own.

Why Crunchbase shows up in AI answers

Do not take anyone's word for this, including ours. Check it on your own category in about ten minutes.

1. Open Perplexity, which shows its sources inline.
2. Ask a buying question in your category that does not name your company. For example: "Which companies make warehouse robotics for mid size Indian retailers?"
3. Look at the citation list under the answer. Count how many of the cited links are company databases, review sites or directories, and how many are vendor websites.
4. Repeat the same question in ChatGPT with web search on, and in Google AI Overviews.
5. Write down the counts and the date.

You will get a different mix in each engine, and a different mix again next week. That is the honest state of it. The useful finding is not "Crunchbase always wins", it is "here are the five or six sources my buyers' assistants actually read for my category". If a company database is in that set, a complete profile is worth the hour it takes.

One caution before you spend the hour. A profile is a description, not a recommendation. Assistants quote databases for facts like founding year, headquarters, size and category. They quote review sites and editorial lists when they need an opinion. Both jobs matter, and they are different jobs. See also /blog/how-to-get-your-business-listed-on-g2 and /blog/how-to-get-your-business-listed-on-getapp.

What Crunchbase requires

Last verified: 15 October 2026

Two things are gatekeepers. First, a Crunchbase account, which is free to register. Second, the submission has to pass review. Crunchbase documents the submission and editing rules in its Knowledge Center at support.crunchbase.com, and the submission form itself sits at crunchbase.com/add-new-organization. Read both before you start, because the exact required field set changes from time to time.

What the add form asks for

Rules that get submissions rejected

• Duplicates. If a profile already exists, claim it rather than adding a second one.
• Entries that are clearly promotional copy rather than company facts.
• Organizations that cannot be verified to exist, for example no live website and no public trace.

Step by step: add a new profile

1. Search your company name on crunchbase.com first. If a profile exists, stop and go to the claim steps below.
2. Register or sign in at crunchbase.com/register.
3. Open crunchbase.com/add-new-organization.
4. Enter the organization name and website. Crunchbase will check for near matches at this point.
5. Fill the description fields. Write the short description last, after the long one, so you can cut it down from something true.
6. Set location, founded date, operating status, company type and employee band.
7. Add industry categories. Three to five is usually enough.
8. Upload the logo and add social links.
9. Submit. You will see a confirmation that the entry is pending review.
10. Put a calendar reminder for 14 days from today to check whether it is live.

Step by step: claim an existing profile

1. Open the existing profile page.
2. Use the claim or edit option on that page while signed in.
3. Verify that you work at the company, usually through a company domain email address.
4. Once claimed, correct the description, the size band, the categories and the links, then save.

How long it takes

Three separate clocks, and people confuse them.

• Your time to fill the form: 30 to 60 minutes if you write the descriptions first in a document.
• Crunchbase review: a queue, not an instant publish. Crunchbase does not publish a guaranteed turnaround on the public form, so plan for days rather than minutes and check back.
• Time until an assistant quotes it: longest of the three. The page has to be crawled, indexed and then selected. Measure this in weeks, and measure it by asking the engines, not by watching the profile.

What to put in the listing so it gets quoted

A model quoting your profile will usually lift the short description and one or two structured fields. Write for that.

Rules for the short description

1. Lead with the category noun. "Payroll software for", "civil engineering firm that", "B2B logistics marketplace for".
2. Name the buyer. Size, sector and country if it is relevant.
3. Name the constraint you serve. A price band, a region, a compliance regime, a team size.
4. Stop at one sentence. Anything longer gets truncated at the point you did not choose.
5. Use no superlatives. They are unverifiable and they are the first thing a careful model drops.

Worked example you can copy

Here is a made up company, so you can see the edit rather than argue with the facts.

Before: "Nimbus is a next generation, world class platform revolutionising how modern teams work with data at scale."

After: "Nimbus is a data warehouse monitoring tool for finance teams at 50 to 500 person companies in the EU, with audit logs built for SOC 2 reporting."

The second version contains four things a model can match against a buyer question: a product category, a buyer function, a size band and a region, plus a named compliance standard. The first version contains none. Both are the same length.

Fields people leave blank and should not

• Employee band. Assistants use it to filter answers by vendor size.
• Founded year. It is used to answer "how established are they".
• Headquarters city. It is used for every "in India", "in the UK", "near me" question.
• Categories. Pick buyer words, not internal product words.

Where AI Knows Us fits

AI Knows Us measures how a business is described across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and then does the fixing as well as the measuring: it writes pages, publishes them, and asks other sites to name the business. It runs 13 agents to do that work: intake, discovery, analyst, diagnosis, planner, writer, editor, publisher, scout, outreach, experiment, lifecycle and the copilot. It is made by Clyra Labs in India.

Two things about how it measures are relevant to a page like this one. Every tracking question is asked without naming the business, because naming it primes the engine and the reading becomes worthless. And every rate is shown with a 95 percent range, so two numbers whose ranges overlap are reported as not having moved. That matters here because a Crunchbase profile is exactly the kind of change people over read. If your mention rate moves from 11 percent to 14 percent after a profile goes live, and the ranges overlap, the honest reading is that nothing has been shown to move yet.

Paid plans are not open yet. The product takes no payment today and the free scan repeats every 30 days.

Who should not choose AI Knows Us

• You want a Crunchbase profile written and submitted for you today. This page gives you the steps so you can do it yourself.
• You only care about one engine, for example Google AI Overviews alone. Asking five apps is the point of the design, and you would be paying attention to four readings you do not want.
• You want a single headline percentage with no range next to it. That is not how the numbers are reported.
• You need classic SEO rank tracking and backlink auditing. Those are different tools with established vendors.

Other tools in this space

If you are comparing AI visibility tools while you do directory work, these are the ones you will meet: Profound (tryprofound.com), Peec AI (peec.ai), Otterly.AI (otterly.ai) and Scrunch AI (scrunchai.com). Check their own sites for current engine coverage and pricing, because those change often and we do not restate them here without a date.