CB Insights built its reputation on calling emerging technology markets: unicorn lists, market maps, and research briefs that corporate strategy teams circulate. Its Tech Intelligence Platform is the enterprise product behind that research. aVenture approaches the same domain — understanding private technology companies — from the company record up rather than the market map down.
The CB Insights facts below come from aVenture's public research record on the product; our own figures come from the same database. Everything is as recorded at the time of writing.
What the CB Insights Tech Intelligence Platform is
The Tech Intelligence Platform is the flagship private-market intelligence subscription from CB Insights (CB Information Services, Inc., founded 2010, New York). It monitors more than 11 million private and public companies, covering funding rounds, financials, partnerships, hiring patterns, intellectual property, and competitive dynamics. Proprietary models score company health, predict winners, and surface emerging technology trends across AI, fintech, healthcare, and other innovation categories.
Native AI agents generate target lists, investment memos, scouting reports, and hiring analyses. Subscribers include venture and private equity investors, corporate development and innovation teams, investment bankers, consultants, and angels — often paying $60,000 or more per year for enterprise tiers.
Where CB Insights is strong
- Trend and market-map research. Scoring models, predictive signals, and analyst-grade market maps are the platform's signature — useful when the question is "which markets matter next."
- Corporate innovation workflow. Scouting reports, memo generation, and vendor-comparison outputs map directly onto corporate development jobs.
- Breadth plus signals. Eleven-million-plus companies with hiring, IP, and partnership signals layered on top.
Where aVenture takes a different approach
aVenture starts from the individual company record and builds outward. The platform tracks over 100,000 venture-backed startups from more than 1,200 sources, structured as one linked research graph:
- Company profiles that link to everything. Funding rounds with participating investors, the people who founded and run the company with full career timelines, the products it sells, the news and blog articles that mention it, and the websites it operates.
- Competition observed at the product level. Instead of a market map asserting that two companies share a category, aVenture joins competing products to each other and renders side-by-side comparison tables.
- Website structure as evidence. Research pipelines crawl and classify company websites, reading positioning from what companies build, not just what they announce.
- Transparent provenance. Every record carries its source and change history — you can see where a claim came from before you put it in a memo.
- An honest coverage note. CB Insights' 11M+ company universe is far broader than aVenture's today. Our depth concentrates on current venture-backed, primarily US companies — with significantly more linked detail per record — while coverage of older, non-venture-backed, and non-US companies builds out rapidly.
The economics differ because the production model differs: agent-scaled research pipelines instead of a large analyst operation priced into enterprise contracts.
Feature comparison at a glance
| Dimension | aVenture Research Platform | CB Insights Tech Intelligence |
|---|---|---|
| Core focus | Venture-backed company research | Emerging-tech market intelligence |
| Coverage | 100,000+ venture-backed startups, 1,200+ sources | 11M+ private and public companies |
| Signature output | Linked company research graph | Market maps, scores, research briefs |
| AI features | Agent-scaled research pipelines with provenance | AI agents for memos, scouting, target lists |
| Competitive mapping | Product-to-product joins, comparison tables | Category maps and competitive dynamics |
| People data | Career timelines linked to companies | Hiring patterns and signals |
| Typical buyer | Individual researchers and investors | Enterprise strategy and innovation teams |
| Price point | $199/month list | ~$60,000+/year enterprise tiers |
Pricing
- CB Insights: enterprise subscriptions frequently run $60,000 or more per year, as recorded in our database at the time of writing.
- aVenture: $199 per month list — and a limited-time early-user promotion currently price-matches Crunchbase Pro's published $588-per-year rate for new sign-ups while it runs.
That is not a rounding-error difference; it is a different procurement universe. One requires a budget line; the other, a card.
Which one fits your workflow
Choose CB Insights if you run a corporate strategy or innovation function that consumes market maps, trend calls, and scored vendor landscapes at enterprise scale — that is what the platform and its price are built for.
Choose aVenture if your work is understanding specific venture-backed companies — their products, competitors, funding, people, and public record — with sources you can verify, at a price an individual researcher can justify.
How we sourced this comparison
The CB Insights facts above live in aVenture's public research graph, where the two products are joined as competitors. Browsing that join — and the comparison table it powers — is exactly the feature this article demonstrates.