Load Crunchbase data to DuckDB

Crunchbase is a platform for company intelligence that provides an API for accessing live entity data, search capabilities, and analytics. Everything needed to build a working Crunchbase → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your Crunchbase to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from Crunchbase to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the Crunchbase API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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Crunchbase API at a glance

These values come from the Crunchbase API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Crunchbase API?

The API supports authentication by providing the user key as a query parameter named 'user_key' or as a custom HTTP header named 'X-cb-user-key'.

1. Get your credentials

To obtain your Crunchbase API key, follow these steps: 1. Log in to your Crunchbase account. 2. Navigate to Account Settings. 3. Select Integrations. 4. Locate the Crunchbase API section. 5. Click Show Key to view your API key. If you are a team member, the team owner or admin account is typically required to access these settings. If you do not see the API key, contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) or email enterprisesupport@crunchbase.com.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.crunchbase_source]
user_key = "your_crunchbase_api_key_here"

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What Crunchbase data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Crunchbase endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Crunchbase records?

Crunchbase exposes after_id on v4/data/searches/organizations, so dlt can request only the records that changed since the last run. Set it as the cursor_path and dlt tracks the high-water mark for you between runs.

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{"name": "search_organizations", "endpoint": {
    "path": "v4/data/searches/organizations",
    "data_selector": "items",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "after_id", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated Crunchbase pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading searches/organizations and entities/organizations/{permalink} from the Crunchbase API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def crunchbase_source(user_key=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://api.crunchbase.com/v4/data",
            "auth": {"type": "api_key", "api_key": user_key, "name": "X-cb-user-key", "location": "header"},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "search_organizations", "endpoint": {"path": "v4/data/searches/organizations", "data_selector": "items"}},
            {"name": "organization_cards", "endpoint": {"path": "v4/data/entities/organizations/{entity_id}/cards/{card_id}", "data_selector": "items"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_crunchbase_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="crunchbase_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="crunchbase_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(crunchbase_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_crunchbase_to_duckdb()

Run it with python crunchbase_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query Crunchbase data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("crunchbase_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.searches_organizations.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM crunchbase_data.searches_organizations LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the Crunchbase to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw Crunchbase loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load Crunchbase data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack