StartupWiki – Free Startup Database

A free, Wikipedia-style alternative to Crunchbase for discovering and researching early-stage startups. No accounts, subscriptions, or cluttered UI—just clean startup information accessible to anyone. Target users are investors, researchers, and entrepreneurs who need quick startup data without paywalls.

Crunchbase's aggressive paywall push over the last few years has left a real gap for lightweight, open-access startup data — researchers and early-stage founders increasingly hit friction before they get to anything useful. The closest incumbent is Crunchbase itself, with PitchBook further upstream; both are moving upmarket, which creates space at the bottom. The $1k–5k/mo revenue band is honest but tight — a free, Wikipedia-style model means monetization depends almost entirely on ads or a thin premium tier, neither of which scales easily without significant traffic. The biggest risk is the data problem: startup databases are only as good as their coverage and freshness, and without a paid data team or a strong community contribution loop, the corpus goes stale fast and the core value proposition collapses.