Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase

sshpran about 4 hours ago 23 commentsRead Article on startupwiki.tech

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

I've been building StartupWiki, a free startup database designed to make it easier to discover and research companies.

The original motivation was frustration with how difficult it can be to find information on early-stage startups. Most databases need accounts, or subscriptions, ro just feel too cluttered. I wanted a website that felt like Wikipedia, no accounts, no subscriptions, no weird metrics, just go in, the info is on the page.

The project is still very early, but currently includes:

Startup profiles Search and filtering Company categorization Public API (in progress)

I'm especially interested in feedback on:

What information you look for when researching startups Features missing from existing startup databases API use cases

I'd love to hear feedback.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

63% Positive

Analyzed from 514 words in the discussion.

Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tlb•20 minutes ago

0 for 10 on some startups (large and small, YC and not) that came to mind.

It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies. Scrape that and a dozen other investors' portfolio pages and you'll have a useful fraction of startups.

shpran•16 minutes ago

Sounds good! its just I used up most of my API key limits in development, and I'm keeping some so I can run improvement pipelines or fix errors, so il batch the YC companies day by day, there's 5000 companies, so il do about 800 each day for 5-6 days.

deepspace•15 minutes ago

Same here. I work with a lot of startups, some of them very prominent and none of them are listed.

CharlesW•about 2 hours ago

I expected the VERIFIED badges to link to some sort of provenance information. That seems like a must, otherwise (given the "assume everything's incorrect" disclaimers) I'm not sure why one would take that badge seriously.

shpran•3 minutes ago

I got the agents to cite sources, there's a bug with fetching the urls from the DB, the way it should work is when you hit verified it leads you to the source, working on fixing it now. Also I will try to add an agent ledger tab soon, that shows exactly what the agents were doing.

simonw•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, the "verified" badges are useless if they don't link to sources or at least provide some indication of how they were verified and when.

dgrin91•about 2 hours ago

It sounds like none of the data will be reliable? Ai and community seems like very little will be true and I will have no idea which part will be true.

lorecore•about 2 hours ago

Crunchbase is also not very reliable. It's community/self-reported data.

debarshri•about 2 hours ago

Crunchbase is generally self reported data

sixtyj•about 1 hour ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572472

Why do you ask again for feedback after three days?

shpran•23 minutes ago

As far as I can tell from FAQs on hacker news, if your previous post failed to gain significant feedback (in this case, only 1 user interacted with my old post) you are allowed to repost in 36 hours.

LewisVerstappen•32 minutes ago

what's wrong with that? Just ignore the post if you don't want to see it.

Build and sharing is awesome

shpran•9 minutes ago

just added roughly 20 startups, focusing on biotech

LewisVerstappen•30 minutes ago

Mobile view is not working on my iPhone. Scroll is messed up and the page is not properly fitting in the view.

anandukch•24 minutes ago

How are you going to take care of the genuineness of the data

shpran•15 minutes ago

AI agents have to cite sources for each thing (there's a bug with displaying sources, it should let u click a fact and send you to where the agent got it. I'm working on fixing that right now). Users can also flag errors, and I'm going to periodically run fact-checking agents and manually go in and check info. However, obviously this will likely still not be perfect, accuracy will probably be the number 1 challenge with this site.

djvdq•about 1 hour ago

I see quite outdated data. Anthropic listed with valuation 18B and latest round at 4b? Just to compare, their real latest round was 65b with valuation 965b.

shpran•21 minutes ago

yeah, just spotted the error, AI agents seem to be searching for news without adding keywords like "latest", I'm updating that, and changing some system prompts, also adding a fact checking agent, and restarting the server to run an imrpovment pipeline to update these profiles. Might take a while for it to finish running though, Il try to update stuff manually till its done.

holistio•about 2 hours ago

It is unclear how I can list my company here. Are small companies coming later?

shpran•8 minutes ago

just launched the button, click it, fill out form, il manually go in aprove, and write your profile.

rkwap•about 2 hours ago

Nice initiative. but, I am concerned about the reliability of the data. how are you gonna take care of that?

shpran•19 minutes ago

AI agents have to cite where they get stuff from, also people can flag issues, and I'm gonna run pipelines periodically to fact check pages. But yeah, with this kind of site I do agree accuracy is gonna take a lot of engineering to improve.

Flavius•29 minutes ago

He's going to take your comment and give it to Claude as a prompt.