Find named Crunchbase entity candidates and their identifiers
View all Crunchbase Company & Investment Data endpoints →Look up a name with the required query string to obtain candidate Crunchbase entities and identifiers for subsequent research. The optional type string defaults to all and can narrow the lookup to company, investor, school, person, funding_round, acquisition, ipo, fund, event, hub, category, category_group, location, city, region, country or product. The optional integer limit defaults to 10 and accepts 1-25; it caps the number of returned results, not a documented page size for a paginated export. The documented response example contains items, query, type and total_count. Each example item contains id, uuid, name, type, link, image, short_description, facets and the boolean is_investor. No live probe is recorded for this endpoint, so these are unverified example fields rather than a confirmed live schema, and the meaning of total_count relative to limit is not independently verified. Use item identity and type to let a user select a candidate; a similar name is not proof of a unique match, and the suggestion data is not a substitute for a complete entity profile. The type request value is a search constraint, while each item's type describes the returned candidate; is_investor is an example response field, not an additional request filter.
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/api/project/crunchbase/autocomplete API Response (JSON)
{} curl -X GET 'https://api.opendata-api.com/api/project/crunchbase/autocomplete?key=<API_KEY>&query=stripe&type=all'
Query Result
Use Cases
- Build a typed entity picker that waits for an explicit company, investor, person or event selection before requesting more detailed records.
- Convert an analyst spreadsheet of inconsistent names into a candidate-resolution queue that retains query context and avoids automatic identity merges.
- Find candidate location or category identifiers for acquisition-screening filters and let a researcher confirm the intended geography or industry.
- Distinguish an investor, school or company with a similar name by inspecting candidate type and description before linking it to a research workspace.
- Resolve a named funding round or acquisition to a candidate ID, then use the selected identity for a separate deal-detail lookup rather than treating the suggestion as a full record.
Frequently asked questions
Does autocomplete return a complete company or person profile?
No complete profile is established by the supplied evidence. The documented example returns candidate identities with contextual fields such as short_description, type and link. Select the intended entity first and request the relevant detail operation separately. No live probe is recorded for this endpoint.
How do I search only for a specific kind of entity?
Set type to a documented value such as company, investor, person, funding_round, acquisition, event or location. The default is all. Other documented options include school, ipo, fund, hub, category, category_group, city, region, country and product; multi-type syntax is not documented.
What are the default and maximum suggestion limits?
limit defaults to 10 and accepts integers from 1 to 25. This endpoint has no documented pagination input. Although the example includes total_count, the supplied evidence does not verify how that count relates to the requested limit.
Can I automatically treat the first name match as the correct entity?
The documentation does not guarantee a unique match or define the first result as authoritative. Review identifiers, name, type and available description or link, and retain multiple candidates for user selection when the name is ambiguous.
Which identifier and context fields appear in the response example?
The unverified example has an items array plus query, type and total_count. Each item shows id, uuid, name, type, link, image, short_description, facets and is_investor. This describes the documented example, not a guarantee that all fields are populated for every entity type.
Can I use is_investor as a request filter?
No such request parameter is documented. is_investor is a boolean in the example response. Use the documented type=investor scope when looking for investor candidates, then inspect the returned candidate data.