Legacy Exports

📘

Customers under legacy Crunchbase agreements may have contractual access to data exports. This guide explains the currently supported export formats and how to leverage them.

Crunchbase provides downloadable data exports for customers who want full collection snapshots outside of the REST API.

Exports are available in two formats:

• NDJSON (Recommended) – preserves nested and complex JSON structures
• CSV (Legacy Flat Format) – flattened tabular structure for spreadsheet-based workflows

Both formats are delivered as compressed .zip files and are available per collection.

Each morning, updated files are generated for endpoint collections such as companies, people, funding rounds, acquisitions, and IPOs.

👍

Your API package determines which files you can download.

For more information on our different API packages, check out this page. The following table outlines which packages have access to our different files:

⭐ NDJSON Export (Recommended)

NDJSON (Newline Delimited JSON) preserves nested and complex JSON structures without flattening relationships or losing data fidelity.

Each export is delivered as a compressed .zip file containing a .ndjson file. Each line in the file represents one valid JSON object (one record per line).

Why use NDJSON?

• Supports nested objects and arrays
• No artificial flattening of relationships
• Better for data lakes and warehouses
• Ideal for Spark, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, etc.
• Future-proof schema evolution

NDJSON URL Format

https://api.crunchbase.com/v4/data/static_exports/<collection>.ndjson.zip?user_key=<user_key>

Accessing the CSV Export (Flat Format)

CSV exports are available for customers who prefer a flat, tabular structure.

These files are:

• Flattened representations of the API data
• Delivered as compressed .zip files
• Structured for compatibility with Excel and traditional BI tools

CSV URL Format

https://api.crunchbase.com/v4/data/static_exports/<collection>.zip?user_key=<user_key>

Accessing the CSV/NDJSON endpoints

Locate your User Key. The user key is a 32 character string that you should have received after signing up for Crunchbase data. If you have not received your user key, please contact support.

Enter URL Into Your Browser. Once you’ve located your user key, type the URL address corresponding to the file you wish to download into your browser, replacing "<user_key>" with the value that you received.

Download URLs (NDJSON ⭐ Recommended)

Download URLs (CSV Option)

Unzip the file. You will have downloaded a .zip file containing the NDJSON/CSV you've requested. Unzip the file to begin using the file.

📘

CSVs Format & Encoding

Our CSVs are encoded in UTF-8 and followed the standard CSV format of:

• escape character is "" (double quotes)
• field delimiter is ',' (comma)
• record delimiter is '\n' (new line)

This is a standard CSV format that should behave appropriately if opened with tools or libraries that are configured to the default CSV format listed above.

Using the Data Exports

We encourage you to leverage the Data Export for your internal business and research needs. You are also welcome to publish analysis and aggregate statistics derived from the Crunchbase dataset. Unless otherwise noted in your license or Data Access Terms, you may not license, sublicense, sell, offer to sell, distribute or otherwise provide any of the Crunchbase data to any third parties.

Attribution Requirements

When sharing information about the data, follow these attribution requirements.

• Attribution must be accompanied by a hyperlink to Crunchbase
• If content being attributed is primarily about one entity, link must point to that entity on Crunchbase.
• Link must be plainly visible to end user
• Link must be in close proximity to the attributed data
• Link must be visible to Internet spiders (e.g. Googlebot)
• Link cannot include the “nofollow” tag"