A funding round is a moving target. It appears on a company newsroom, gets picked up by press, lands in a regulatory filing, and only later reaches a structured database. Each hop adds lag, so a provider that is flawless on rounds from two years ago can be flatly wrong about a round announced last Tuesday.
That is the problem the Openbenchmarks company funding board set out to measure. In August 2026, per Firecrawl’s write-up of the results, the independent board ran 17 providers over the same company domains and judged each returned stage against a reviewed ground truth.
Two boards, because one rank hides the tradeoff
The board splits its score in half. Freshness covers rounds announced in the trailing 30 days — how fast a provider indexes a new announcement. Enrichment covers older rounds — how completely a provider has backfilled history.
Those two reward opposite things. A provider that indexes fast can hold a thin historical record; a deep database can lag badly on last week’s news. Averaging them into one number would describe neither job, so they are ranked separately.
One caveat worth carrying into any vendor conversation: only the latest stage is judged for correctness. Round amount, total raised, and round count are counted for presence, not accuracy. A high “funding fields returned” figure means fields were filled in, not that the numbers inside them are right.
What the freshness board shows
On recent rounds, live-web providers lead. Firecrawl’s agent posted 100% latest-stage-correct (Spark 2), with Exa’s instant search at 98.0%, Exa’s agent at 97.0%, Firecrawl’s second model at 96.0%, and Parallel’s Task API at 95.0%. Crunchbase’s reviewed export matched them at 95.1%.
Stored-database GTM providers trail hard here: Apollo at 59.7%, People Data Labs at 13.3%, CompanyEnrich at 12.7%. That gap is ingestion lag, not incompetence. A database has not yet absorbed a round announced nine days ago; an agent reading the live web has.
Where the stored records earn their place
On historical rounds the field tightens but agents still lead. Firecrawl topped enrichment at 92.3%, Parallel at 90.0%, Exa’s deep and agent modes near 88.6%, Crunchbase at 85.8%. The strongest true-API GTM provider on that board was Fiber at 84.9%.
Cost and speed run the other way. The accuracy leaders are the slowest and priciest per call — Firecrawl’s agent runs around 102 seconds and an estimated $1.98 per company, with Exa’s agent near $10.00. Web search APIs return in seconds for cents; GTM database lookups in a few hundred milliseconds. Cost figures are modeled from observed billing units at published rates, not invoiced.
How to choose without a single winner
Pick by the job, not the ranking:
- High-value lookups and monitoring, where being right beats shaving milliseconds: a long-running agent.
- Volume screening where a round from last week rarely matters: a database read is cheap and fast.
- Middle ground: web search APIs, whose accuracy tracks how well a round was covered on the open web.
If you are already wiring retrieval into an agent, the same reasoning applies as in choosing a web search API for agents: define the retrieval task first, then let the benchmark axes — freshness, enrichment, latency, cost — decide the vendor.
The limitation is that this board judges one field. If your product depends on round amounts or investor names being correct, the supplied results do not tell you which provider wins that job.
Sources
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.