Show HN: Startup data 2000-2012 from CrunchBase

Were some companies acquired multiple times the same year, or is there a bug somewhere? (RazorFish is listed 3 times in 2002, DoubleClick and Skype twice in 2005, Getty Images twice in 2008, Sterling Commerce twice in 2009.)

It's crazy that there are so many huge companies that I've never heard of. Instagram's acquisition was huge news at $1B, but I didn't hear a peep about Ariba at $4.3B or Genzyme at $20B.

It's easy to think that consumer oriented web startups are what's hot, but this data proves otherwise.

I wonder if a lot of the "there's no innovation any more" talk is a result of the fact that things like biotech just doesn't get the same coverage as the web startups?

There's a lot of biotech/pharmacutecal companies in those lists. Something is happening in that industry, even if we don't hear much about it here and elsewhere.

Crunchbase is pretty incomplete before 2004 it seems.

Several of the comm companies I checked were missing.

Edit: Upon further testing, it seems that many of the communications wipeouts ($40+M) from that era are missing. It's almost as if the people who funded them don't want the magnitude of the mistakes in the record.

Here's an example: Photonex, raised $170M [1] over the course of their lifetime and not a trace on crunchbase of who the culprits were.

Another quick example: Solinet [2] raised a pile of dough (they later renamed themselves Ceyba).

[1] http://www.lightreading.com/ip-convergence/photonex-scores-h...

[2] http://www.lightreading.com/ip-convergence/solinet-systems-s...

(I run SeedTable which also does analytics on Crunchbase data)

The problem with ranking by funding/acquisition amounts is the data is pretty dirty, and outliers are disproportionately likely to be incorrect data (because someone fat fingered a number to be an order of magnitude larger, or put a foreign currency amount in as USD). Although the acq data is better than the funding data.

You might also want to extract stuff like biotech from the data because it's fundamentally a completely separate market from software tech.