Crunchbase Inc., the tech startup directory that grew out of the popular TechCrunch news site and was spun out of AOL Inc. 18 months ago, has raised $18 million in a series B funding round and launched a high-end Crunchbase Enterprise version of its premium subscription services.

The latest round was led by Mayfield Fund and brings to $26.5 million the company’s total venture investment, according to Crunchbase itself. The company said it will use the funds to develop its product and expand the breadth and depth of its database.

Founded in 2007, Crunchbase is best known as a research tool for investors, journalists, recruiters and others who seek insights on budding companies. It’s known for its detailed funding information and profiles of leadership teams. The free service gets about 2.3 million unique visitors per month.

Crunchbase derived revenue solely from custom cuts of its database until last fall, when it introduced a Pro version that includes more-powerful query tools, alerts, social media mentions and other information that is of interest to potential investors. The success of that service attracted investors for the new fundraising round, according to Chief Executive Jager McConnell (pictured). He said the Pro edition is “well past” 5,000 paying subscribers at $29 per month.

With the new cash infusion, the company is cooking up bigger plans to leverage data from other sources that relate to its core company and executive information. It has already signed partnership deals with more than 10 data providers, including Glassdoor Inc. and SimilarWeb Ltd., to enrich Crunchbase data with their own. The company hopes that by expanding services it can break out of its narrow investor-focused niche to become a broader customer relationship management and recruiting tool.

“Sometimes people want to know not just about funding, but about jobs, the CEO or all the companies in their geography that have a certain amount of website traffic,” McConnell said. “Or sales reps want to find people who use a competitive product. Right now, they need three partners to get all that data. We want to let you choose it as part of the experience.”

The enhanced data services will launch later this year. Some will be free, some included as part of paid subscriptions and some will be provided via a pass-through to the data provider. McConnell wouldn’t speculate about pricing.

Crunchbase Enterprise, which is available immediately, includes a team license of Pro for group use along with full access to the Crunchbase application program interface “so that you can do whatever you want with the data,” McConnell said. “We don’t charge by the record, so you can integrate it with whatever uses you have.”

The service also integrates with Salesforce.com Inc.’s customer relationship management service. Crunchbase records and updates can be loaded daily into Salesforce and triggers set to fire based on changes in the database. Enterprise users can also download full data sets from Crunchbase for data modeling purposes, McConnell said.

The service is priced at $99 per user per month with a five-user and 12-month minimum commitment.

Photo: Crunchbase