CB Insights Curates Reports — AlphaLens Indexes the Entire Product Layer
CB Insights has analysts curate market maps. AlphaLens has indexed 12 million live products — the actual things companies build and sell. You get a search layer that's always current, never gated behind an analyst's update cycle, and an automated pipeline that turns inbound decks into enriched CRM entries without manual work.
AlphaLens indexes products at scale — 12M+ in the past year. CB Insights indexes companies and assigns them to analyst-curated categories. Different architecture, different results.
CB Insights is genuinely strong on packaged research: sector reports, market sizing, competitive landscape maps, and the annual lists that get forwarded to boards. If circulating pre-built briefings to leadership is a core workflow, they do it well.
Where it breaks down: the AI chat (Mosaic) is database-bound and widely underwhelming, there's no inbound deck processing, no field-level CRM sync, and coverage thins outside US venture-backed tech. AlphaLens fills those gaps with product-level search, Web Agents that research live sources, and end-to-end pipeline automation.
How AlphaLens and CB Insights Actually Differ
| Feature |  | CB Insights |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Agentic sourcing & triage platform | Market intelligence & analyst research platform |
| Inbound deck processing | Native. Drop a DocSend/Pitch.com URL — auto-extract, enrich, create CRM entity | None. Manual read → manual search → manual CRM entry |
| Search | Semantic search across 12M+ indexed products from 10M+ tracked companies — the only platform that indexes live product-level data at scale. Search by what products do, not curated category trees. | Keyword search with proprietary taxonomy; strong for browsing curated categories, weak for bespoke queries |
| Custom due diligence | Deploy Web Agents that answer your bespoke questions with cited sources, formatted to your CRM field constraints | Pre-packaged analyst reports; Mosaic AI chat for database queries — limited to their data model, frequently cited as shallow |
| CRM integration | Native field-level sync to Affinity, Attio, Salesforce, HubSpot | CSV exports; API available but complex to configure and expensive |
| Coverage approach | White-glove onboarding: bring your data, we learn your market, guarantee coverage parity, and fine-tune our indexing to your thesis. No other platform does this | Curated coverage of venture-backed companies globally; strong on US, weaker outside major hubs |
| Pricing model | Credit-based, starting at $1K/mo. No per-seat fees. Full API access included | Annual enterprise contracts, typically $50K–$100K+/yr. Sold primarily to corporate strategy and innovation teams |
| Chrome Extension | Deep company intelligence on any website or LinkedIn page — team, growth metrics, products, funding, similar companies in one click | No standalone Chrome extension |
| Funding data freshness | Real-time funding signals powered by AI agents, proprietary data, and community partners — a continuously refreshed flywheel with global coverage | Funding data present but secondary to their research layer; can lag weeks behind actual events |
| AI / chat assistant | Web Agents that go live on the internet to answer bespoke questions — not limited to our database | Mosaic AI: answers questions about their internal database only; widely considered underwhelming relative to the product's positioning |
| Analyst reports & market maps | Not our format — we surface live company and product intelligence, not pre-packaged research briefs | Flagship strength. High-quality sector reports, market sizing analyses, and visual market maps that are easy to circulate internally and present to leadership CB Insights strength |
| Corporate innovation benchmarking | Not our focus — we're built for investment workflows, not enterprise strategy benchmarking | Strong tools for corporate R&D teams tracking startup activity in adjacent sectors, benchmarking innovation spend, and mapping ecosystem players CB Insights strength |
| API access | Full API included in every plan — no separate tiers between web app and API | API available but treated as a premium add-on with separate configuration requirements |
Your Pipeline Today vs. Your Pipeline on AlphaLens
- 1Receive deck via email or DocSend
- 2Read it manually — CB Insights can't parse decks
- 3Search CB Insights, browse analyst reports if they exist
- 4Screenshot or export data, manually enter into CRM
- 1Browse curated market maps by analyst taxonomy
- 2Export companies from a report to a spreadsheet
- 3Manually enrich — Mosaic AI hits its limits fast
- 4Copy-paste findings into CRM, hope nothing's stale
AlphaLens handles both motions in a single system. Inbound decks are auto-parsed, enriched, and pushed to your CRM. Outbound searches run daily, feeding new matches into the same pipeline. No manual steps, no context-switching.
Built for the way you actually work
Search That Thinks Like You Do
CB Insights organises the world into curated category taxonomies maintained by analysts. AlphaLens has indexed over 12 million products in the past year — the actual things companies build and sell. This is an architectural difference, not a feature gap. Analyst-curated categories are always a step behind what the market is actually doing. Product-level indexing captures what exists right now.
All searches can be saved with alerts, and results export to CSV with one click.
12 Million Products Indexed — and Counting
CB Insights indexes companies and assigns them to analyst-curated market maps. AlphaLens indexes products — the actual things companies build, sell, and bring to market. With over 12 million products indexed in the past year alone, no platform gives you a more granular or more current view of what the market actually looks like.
Don't just find companies in an analyst category — find every product competing in a space. Map a vertical by what tools do, how they're positioned, and who they target. No waiting for an analyst to update a market map.
A company absent from CB Insights' 'AI in Healthcare' market map might be the most capable player in clinical decision support tooling. Product-level indexing finds them. Curated category maps don't.
12 million products indexed in the past year, continuously updated. No competitor has attempted this. It is AlphaLens's deepest structural moat — and the reason our search returns results that CB Insights' taxonomy cannot surface.
Product-level search is available on every AlphaLens plan, including API access.
Agentic Triage, Enrichment & Research
CB Insights gives you analyst reports and a chat assistant that can't leave their database. AlphaLens gives you a pipeline that triages, routes, scores, enriches, and researches — automatically. Every company that enters your pipeline is scored for priority, routed to the right team or stage, enriched with deep entity data, and then handed to Web Agents that go live on the internet to answer your most specific DD questions.
Coverage Built Around You, Not Everyone
CB Insights' coverage reflects what their analysts have had time to curate — strong in US venture-backed tech, thinner everywhere else. AlphaLens takes a fundamentally different approach: we learn your market, build coverage around your thesis, and keep it current.
End-to-End Workflow Automation
CB Insights is a place you go to read research. AlphaLens is a system that runs your pipeline.
Sourcing → triage → enrichment → scoring → CRM routing. End to end.
Real-time ocean and air freight market intelligence
Benchmarking and analytics across 200,000+ freight lanes. Data-driven procurement tools and market monitoring.
The company offers real-time ocean and air freight market intelligence solutions with benchmarking and analytics capabilities. The company provides data-driven procurement tools and market monitoring services across 200,000+ freight lanes, enabling rate analysis and performance optimization.
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Growth & signals
Latest funding
- Private Equity$9.3M2025-09-23Investors:Apax Partners
- Series D$80.0M2022-09-13Investors:Lugard Capital Limited, Apax Partners
Digital freight forwarder and customs broker with real-time visibility and analytics for ocean and air freight.
Real-time visibility platform for ocean, air, truck, and rail freight with predictive analytics.
Online freight marketplace and rate benchmarking for international shipping.
A Chrome Extension That Goes Deep
Visit any company's website or LinkedIn page. One click gives you everything your team needs, right where you're already browsing. CB Insights has no equivalent.
- Full company profile — team, incorporation details, addresses
- Growth metrics — headcount trends, web traffic, social following
- Product data and descriptions
- Funding history
- All similar products in the market — navigate to any of them instantly
It's like having an analyst tab open for every company you encounter online.
Transparent and team-friendly
CB Insights is sold as an annual enterprise contract — typically $50,000–$100,000+/yr — aimed at corporate strategy teams and innovation labs at large companies. Per-seat pricing and add-on modules for API access are standard. It's a budget line that requires procurement approval.
AlphaLens is credit-based, starting at $1,000/month. Your entire team shares a generous credit pool — no per-seat fees, no artificial access gates.
Credit usage — you only pay for what you use
Included in every plan — no add-ons
- Full API access — same capabilities as the web app
- Native CRM integrations with granular field-level mapping
- Chrome Extension
- Saved searches with real-time alerts
- CSV export
- Pipeline automation
When CB Insights Might Be the Right Choice
We believe in being straightforward about this. Many of our customers use AlphaLens alongside CB Insights — using us for top-of-funnel velocity and pipeline automation, and CB Insights for deep-dive financial diligence later in the process.
Analyst reports & market maps
CB Insights' flagship product is high-quality sector research: market sizing, competitive landscape maps, trend reports, and the annual lists (Unicorns, AI 100, etc.) that get forwarded to boards. If your workflow involves circulating pre-packaged research internally or presenting sector overviews to leadership, CB Insights is genuinely good at this. It's not territory AlphaLens is trying to cover.
Corporate innovation benchmarking
Purpose-built tools for enterprise strategy teams tracking startup activity in adjacent sectors, benchmarking R&D investment, and mapping ecosystem players across industries. If you're a corporate innovation or M&A team doing broad landscape work, CB Insights has the right product format.
Structured taxonomy browsing
CB Insights has invested heavily in curating sector taxonomies. If your team wants to browse 'all players in the conversational AI for healthcare space' across a well-maintained category tree, their UI is designed for that kind of structured discovery.
Pre-packaged briefing content
The CB Insights newsletter and Briefings product surface curated signals and research digests. For leadership teams that want market intelligence delivered as readable summaries rather than a search tool, that's a workflow fit AlphaLens doesn't replicate.
Frequently Asked Questions
See AlphaLens in Action
Book a 15-minute demo and see how AlphaLens automates your sourcing pipeline — from inbound deck to enriched CRM entry.
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