New signals reveal where private markets are forming, competing and heading next
SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / June 2, 2026 / Crunchbase, the leading predictive solution for private company intelligence, today announced a new suite of market insights that help investors and go-to-market (GTM) teams track which sectors are growing and declining, gain a deeper understanding of competitive landscapes and act on emerging opportunities before market shifts.
“Imagine if you had spotted the opportunity in AI coding assistants when they were a handful of unknown startups, not when they had already raised billions,” said Jager McConnell, CEO of Crunchbase. “That’s what our new market insights can do: reveal where momentum is forming early, so you can get ahead of the next big market, instead of chasing it.”
The launch comes on the heels of significant commercial momentum for Predictions and Insights in Crunchbase. In Q1 2026, Crunchbase saw average contract value (ACV) grow 900% year-over-year, driven by surging enterprise demand across financial services, investment firms and software/AI companies for trusted private market data to fuel AI transformation. The company’s two largest deals in its history closed in the last two quarters.
Building on Predictive Intelligence
These new market insights are the latest addition to Crunchbase’s predictive intelligence, which debuted in early 2025 and is powered by AI and the unique combination of nearly 20 years of proprietary startup data with real-time activity signals from more than 80 million users. More than 17,700 company-level predictions have already been confirmed by real-world events.
For example, Crunchbase flagged defense tech startup Anduril Industries as a likely fundraising candidate more than a month before its $5 billion round was announced in May. Crunchbase also called modular nuclear power plant company Blue Energy’s raise eight months before it announced its $380M round in April.
With market insights, Crunchbase’s predictive intelligence goes beyond individual companies to provide sector-level intelligence that reveals how private markets are structured, how competition forms and where momentum is heading next.
A traditional classification puts every autonomous vehicle company under a single broad North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) category. Crunchbase’s new micro-industries break that into more specific segments, such as Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), Autonomous Vehicle Systems and Robo-Taxi & Autonomous Shuttle Services, enabling a more precise picture of how companies compete based on shared products, customer segments and market positioning.
What’s New
Micro-industries: Granular market segments that organize companies based on what they build, not what broad category they’ve been assigned to. Crunchbase generates more than 5,100 micro-industries based on its proprietary products and services data, spanning 13.2M products mapped to micro-industries.
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Why it matters: This dynamic segmentation layer is precise enough to define an ideal customer profile (ICP), map whitespace or identify emerging categories before they become mainstream.
Advanced competitive intelligence: Competitors data identifies a company’s top competitors, ranks them and assigns each a competitive score. This release strengthens accuracy and, for the first time, provides competitor reasons, or plain-language explanations of why companies compete, built on a proprietary machine learning model trained on Crunchbase data and refined by a targeted LLM layer.
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Why it matters: Now, professionals can catch rising challengers before they appear in analyst reports or funding headlines. Plain-language competitor reasons eliminate the need for additional manual research and explain why companies compete, including product overlap, shared customer segments and geographic context.
Market Insights signal: A new, standardized indicator of whether a market segment, such as an industry or micro-industry, is emerging, growing or declining. Crunchbase aggregates funding and exit activity, profile engagement and macroeconomic context across companies within a segment to produce a directional label and plain-language summary.
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Why it matters: No more manually stitching together company-level signals to get an industry-level view. For investors and venture capital/private equity firms, that means earlier conviction to act faster on deals, positioning and strategy. For GTM teams, early signals help prioritize pipeline in growing markets and avoid declining ones.
Expanding Crunchbase’s Leadership Team to Scale What’s Next
To accelerate its next phase of growth, Crunchbase recently appointed Ketaki Rao as Chief Product Officer, bringing deep expertise in AI and data, and promoted Ann Davis to Chief Revenue Officer.
“Enterprises need trusted private market data and predictive intelligence, and they’re increasingly turning to Crunchbase for it,” said McConnell. “With the addition of Ketaki and Ann, our executive leadership team brings exactly the combination of AI product depth and enterprise go-to-market experience we need to scale what market insights represent, and execute on the opportunities ahead.”
“What drew me to Crunchbase is that the hardest problem in AI is the data,” said Rao. “Crunchbase has built a proprietary foundation that no one else has. Market insights is what happens when you combine that data depth with AI and fundamentally change how people understand private markets, so they can find and act on opportunities faster than ever before.”
Looking ahead, Crunchbase’s 2026 roadmap includes model context protocol (MCP) connectors, a model-estimated current valuation signal and more robust data coverage including revenue and headcount data, as well as expanded coverage of startups globally.
About Crunchbase
Crunchbase is the leading predictive solution for private company intelligence, helping business decision-makers stay ahead of private market shifts so they can identify opportunities earlier and act first. Only Crunchbase combines nearly two decades of proprietary data and AI with unique engagement signals from more than 80 million users to forecast funding, growth, and exits across the private company lifecycle. From investors and dealmakers to go-to-market teams and product builders, enterprises use Crunchbase data to power workflows, products, and decisions.
Crunchbase delivers intelligence through its flexible API, CRM integrations, and platform. To learn more, visit crunchbase.com and follow Crunchbase on LinkedIn and X.
Press Contact
Anna Rice
press@crunchbase.com
SOURCE: Crunchbase
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