By James Aspinwall — February 2026
You’re about to email a VP of Engineering at a Series B fintech. Do you know how much they raised? Who their investors are? Whether they’re hiring or laying off? What their employees say about the engineering culture? What tech stack they run?
If you don’t, you’re pitching blind. Five tools fix that. Each answers a different question, and together they give you a complete picture before you ever send the first message.
The Tools
Crunchbase — The Company Resume
What it tells you: Funding history, investors, founding date, team size, acquisitions, key people, company description.
When to use it: First thing you check when you hear a company name. It answers “is this company real, how big are they, and do they have money?”
What to look for:
- Funding stage and amount — A pre-seed startup with $500K can’t afford enterprise software. A Series C with $80M probably can.
- Last funding date — Raised 6 months ago? They’re spending. Raised 3 years ago with no follow-on? They might be running lean or struggling.
- Investors — Known investors signal credibility and network. A company backed by a16z operates differently than a bootstrapped shop.
- Team size trend — Growing from 30 to 80 in a year? They’re scaling fast and likely have pain points around tooling, process, and infrastructure.
- Key people — Find the decision makers before you start outreach. Know their titles and backgrounds.
Limitations: Crunchbase data skews toward VC-backed tech companies. Bootstrapped companies, agencies, and non-tech firms are often missing or sparse. Free tier is limited — the paid plans ($29–$49/month) unlock filtering and exports.
PitchBook — The Investor-Grade Deep Dive
What it tells you: Everything Crunchbase tells you, plus detailed financials, valuation estimates, cap tables, deal comparables, and market maps.
When to use it: When a prospect is serious and you need to understand their financial position, competitive landscape, or prepare for a high-stakes pitch.
What to look for:
- Valuation estimates — Helps you calibrate deal size. A company valued at $500M has a different budget than one at $20M.
- Revenue estimates — Not always available, but when present, tells you more than funding alone.
- Comparable deals — “Companies like yours typically spend X on this category” is a powerful framing.
- Market maps — Who are their competitors? Where do they sit in the landscape? This informs your positioning.
Limitations: Expensive — PitchBook is institutional-grade ($20K+/year). Not practical for solo operators or small firms. If you have access through an employer or incubator, use it. Otherwise, Crunchbase covers 80% of the same ground.
Apollo — The Outreach Machine
What it tells you: Verified email addresses, phone numbers, org charts, job titles, company technographics, and intent signals.
When to use it: When you’ve identified a prospect company and need to find the right person to contact and how to reach them.
What to look for:
- Verified emails — Apollo’s strength. Find the VP of Engineering’s work email, verified against their mail server. Confidence scores tell you how reliable the data is.
- Org charts — See who reports to whom. If the VP won’t respond, maybe the Director will champion your tool internally.
- Technographics — What technologies does the company use? If they run Python and you’re selling an Elixir-based solution, you need to know that before the pitch, not during it.
- Intent data — Some plans show which companies are actively researching topics related to your product. A company searching for “compliance automation” is warmer than one that isn’t.
- Sequences — Apollo can automate multi-step outreach (email → wait 3 days → follow up → LinkedIn touch). Useful at scale but easy to abuse — personalize or don’t bother.
Limitations: Data accuracy varies. Always verify critical emails before a high-stakes outreach. The free tier gives 50 credits/month — enough for targeted prospecting, not mass outreach. Paid plans start at $49/month.
G2 — The Customer Perspective
What it tells you: What a company’s customers think about their product. Reviews, ratings, comparisons, feature breakdowns, and competitive positioning.
When to use it: Two scenarios. First, when you’re researching a prospect and want to understand their product quality and market position from the outside. Second, when a prospect uses a competitor’s product and you want ammunition.
What to look for:
- Review sentiment — Are customers happy or frustrated? Frustrated customers at a prospect company might be open to alternatives — that’s your opening.
- Feature gaps — Reviewers often mention what’s missing. If your product fills those gaps, you have a ready-made pitch.
- Competitive comparisons — G2 grids show how products rank against each other. If your prospect’s product is losing to competitors in a category you can help with, that’s leverage.
- Company size of reviewers — Tells you what market segment the product serves. Enterprise reviews vs. SMB reviews signal different needs.
Limitations: G2 is most useful for SaaS and software companies. If your prospect sells physical products or services, coverage is thin. Reviews can be gamed — look for patterns across many reviews, not individual outliers.
Glassdoor — The Inside View
What it tells you: What employees think about working there. Salary ranges, interview processes, management quality, company culture, and growth trajectory from the inside.
When to use it: When you need to understand the internal dynamics of a prospect company — especially before a demo or negotiation.
What to look for:
- Engineering culture reviews — If engineers complain about “legacy systems” and “technical debt,” your modernization pitch just got stronger.
- Growth vs. contraction signals — Lots of recent reviews from new hires? They’re growing. Lots of “the layoffs were handled poorly” reviews? Tread carefully.
- Management quality — Reviews mentioning “great leadership” vs. “no direction” tell you whether deals will move fast or stall in committee.
- Salary data — Gives you a rough sense of the company’s compensation level, which correlates with budget for tooling and services.
- Interview process — Reveals what the company values. A company with rigorous technical interviews values engineering excellence — position your product accordingly.
Limitations: Skews negative — happy employees rarely write reviews. Read for patterns, not individual complaints. Small companies may have too few reviews to be meaningful.
How They Work Together
Each tool answers a different question in the prospecting sequence:
| Stage | Question | Tool |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | “Is this company worth pursuing?” | Crunchbase |
| Research | “What’s their financial position and competitive landscape?” | PitchBook (or Crunchbase) |
| Research | “What do their customers say? Where do they struggle?” | G2 |
| Research | “What’s the internal culture like? Are they growing?” | Glassdoor |
| Outreach | “Who’s the right person and how do I reach them?” | Apollo |
| Preparation | “What tech do they use? What’s their org structure?” | Apollo |
A typical workflow for a serious prospect:
- Crunchbase first — 2 minutes. Check funding, size, stage. If they raised $2M three years ago and haven’t grown, probably not your ideal customer. Move on.
- G2 + Glassdoor — 5 minutes. Understand their product from the customer side and their culture from the employee side. Look for pain points that align with what you sell.
- Apollo — 3 minutes. Find the right contact. VP of Engineering? Head of Compliance? Get verified email and LinkedIn.
- Capture everything in your CRM — Save each research source as a linked website. Add notes with what you learned. Set the next action.
Ten minutes of research per prospect. You walk into the conversation knowing their funding, their pain points, their org structure, and the name of the person you’re talking to. That’s the difference between a cold email that gets deleted and one that gets a reply.
Practical Tips
Don’t boil the ocean. You don’t need all five tools for every prospect. Crunchbase + Apollo covers 80% of cases. Add G2 and Glassdoor when the deal is worth the extra 5 minutes.
Capture, don’t bookmark. Looking something up and forgetting it is worse than not looking it up at all. When you find useful intel, write it down — a note in your CRM, a tag on the company, a saved website with a purpose field explaining what you found. Your future self will thank you.
Verify before you send. Apollo emails are usually accurate, but “usually” isn’t “always.” For high-stakes outreach — a C-level exec, a big deal — verify the email independently. A bounced email to a CEO is worse than no email at all.
Look for triggers, not just facts. Static data (founded in 2019, 50 employees) is useful but not actionable. Triggers are actionable: they just raised a round, they just hired 10 engineers, they just lost a key customer, a competitor just failed. Triggers create urgency. Time your outreach to the trigger.
Cross-reference. Crunchbase says 200 employees, Glassdoor says 80 reviews, Apollo says 150 contacts. The numbers won’t match perfectly, but large discrepancies tell you something — maybe they had layoffs, maybe Crunchbase data is stale, maybe Apollo is counting contractors. Triangulate.