Crustdata, a company building real-time data infrastructure for AI agents, announced it has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Y Combinator and A Capital, with participation from General Catalyst, SV Angel, and Phosphor Capital.
The funding will accelerate Crustdata’s mission to index the web for AI-powered applications by providing real-time data about companies and people. Its platform enables customers to track emerging prospects, founders, and hiring candidates before they become widely known—fueling workflows for AI sales, recruiting, and investment systems used by leading organizations globally.
Crustdata’s core technology uses a network of live web crawlers that continuously monitor and organize business and individual data, turning the internet into a structured, machine-readable resource for agentic AI applications.
A graduate of Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 cohort, Crustdata has grown rapidly—scaling revenue from $770,000 to over $4 million in just seven months without any outbound marketing. The company achieved profitability with a one-person sales team, relying entirely on its own platform to power growth.
Crustdata’s technology is already used by high-profile customers and investors. Y Combinator employs it to enhance its founder discovery and recruitment engine. Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, uses Crustdata’s data infrastructure for his product agent.ai, while Ryan Reynolds’ company MNTN leverages Crustdata to automate and optimize AI-driven sales outreach.
The founding team came together through Y Combinator’s co-founder matching tool in 2023. CEO Abhilash Chowdhary previously led robotics engineering at Uber/Postmates, developing the platform for autonomous delivery vehicles. Co-founder Chris Pisarski, former CEO of PrivCo, brings deep experience in B2B data intelligence, while third co-founder Manmohit Grewal rounds out the leadership team.
Crustdata plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and to serve enterprise customers seeking AI agents that act on continuously refreshed, verified data.
KEY QUOTES
“Crustdata is one of the strongest companies to come out of the Fall 2024 YC batch. We were so impressed with the founding team and how quickly they’ve made inroads with B2B customers that we hired them to source and deliver data to help us find and recruit startups to join YC. It quickly became clear that this was a bet I wanted to make from an investment perspective. Very soon, humans will no longer be the largest consumers of the web. Crustdata will be the gateway to the internet for agentic apps.”
Garry Tan, CEO and Founder, Y Combinator
“AI Agents are only as intelligent as their data sources, so we’re excited to work with investors who understand both AI infrastructure and B2B data. Our next phase involves expanding to enterprise customers who need AI agents that can act on fresh, accurate data in real-time.”
Abhilash Chowdhary, Co-Founder and CEO, Crustdata
“We will use the funds to hire top engineers interested in solving the challenging data-for-agents problem as well as to build out our GTM team.”
Chris Pisarski, Co-Founder, Crustdata
