Crustdata closes $6M seed round

Today we announced a $6M seed investment round led by Y Combinator and A Capital, with participation from General Catalyst, SV Angel, and Phosphor Capital.

Better Data Input, Better AI Output

Crustdata is building a data layer with real-time crawlers that index the web for AI Agents. The platform enables customers to monitor all companies and people on the internet in real-time—catching relevant prospects, founders, and recruiting candidates before they become hot commodities. These signals are relied upon by many of the world's best AI SDRs, recruiting platforms, and investment teams worldwide.

"Crustdata is one of the strongest companies to come out of the Fall 2024 YC batch. We were so impressed with the founding team and how quickly they've made inroads with B2B customers that we hired them to source and deliver data to help us find and recruit startups to join YC," said Garry Tan, CEO and Founder of Y Combinator. "It quickly became clear that this was a bet I wanted to make from an investment perspective. Very soon, humans will no longer be the largest consumers of the web. Crustdata will be the gateway to the internet for agentic apps."

Dogfooding for Growth

Crustdata, a graduate of Y Combinator's Fall 2024 cohort, grew revenue from $770K to $4M+ in seven months with zero outbound marketing spend and a sales team of one. Instead of traditional go-to-market tactics, the founders used their own product to bootstrap growth and reach profitability in record time.

The company is seeing rapid customer adoption. Y Combinator uses Crustdata to power its founder discovery and recruitment platform. Dharmesh Shah, Founder of HubSpot, uses Crustdata's data as the underlying layer powering his popular product, agent.ai. Ryan Reynolds' company MNTN is using Crustdata to arm their sales team with a fully customized and automated AI SDR for pipeline building and outreach.

A Match Made in YC Heaven

Co-founders Abhilash Chowdhary and Chris Pisarski are an unlikely pair. The two met through YC's co-founder matching tool in 2023—one in San Francisco, one in New York—and decided they shared a vision to found the company together. Manmohit Grewal joined them as the third co-founder.

Chowdhary previously led engineering teams at Uber/Postmates, where he built the robotics platform powering autonomous delivery robots. Pisarski was previously CEO of PrivCo, the leading private company database for contacts and financial intelligence, used by Microsoft, AmEx, and Deloitte.

"AI Agents are only as intelligent as their data sources, so we're excited to work with investors who understand both AI infrastructure and B2B data," said Abhilash Chowdhary, co-founder and CEO of Crustdata. "Our next phase involves expanding to enterprise customers who need AI agents that can act on fresh, accurate data in real-time."

"We will use the funds to hire top engineers interested in solving the challenging data-for-agents problem as well as to build out our GTM team," added Chris Pisarski, co-founder of Crustdata.