From Scraping Delaware Filings to Data Empire

Every year, billions of dollars of potential investment capital sit idle (or misplaced) because finding reliable information about startups feels like searching for a needle in a digital haystack. Want to know if that promising climate tech company is actually gaining traction, or which other startups working on similar technology are emerging? Good luck. Trying to identify which AI companies are actually hiring versus just adding "AI" to their pitch deck? That'll take weeks of research. This lack of data isn't just frustrating—it's actively hampering innovation by creating friction between great ideas and the capital they need to grow.

Harmonic.ai, under the leadership of CEO Max Ruderman, is tackling this problem head-on by building what he describes as "the source of truth for startups." Their mission: to bring transparency to private markets and transform how investors, corporations, and talent connect with startups

The importance of being first

What started as a simple insight about Delaware corporate filings has evolved into an ambitious mission to become "the source of truth for startups." Ruderman, a former Google engineer who found his entrepreneurial calling after a jiu-jitsu injury benched him, sees Harmonic's role as fundamental to improving capital efficiency in private markets.

"When you think Harmonic, you should think startups. When you think startups, you should think harmonic's the place where those live," says Ruderman, outlining the bare bones vision for the company.

While tools like Crunchbase and Pitchbook have long been what people have had to rely on for startup information, Harmonic is taking a fundamentally different approach. Instead of waiting for funding announcements or press releases, the company's systems continuously monitor and analyze data from countless sources, creating what Ruderman describes as "a Google-search-type data engine, but built for startup data."

"We compile the full team roster, we index and generate embeddings from the company's website text to fuel derived fields... it's not just 'this company exists and this is where it's located,'" Ruderman explains. "We're looking at how their sales headcount changes versus engineering headcount, whether they've hired a heavy hitter, if their web traffic is spiking. It’s about finding leading indicators for sound investment decisions. Not reporting the facts after they’ve happened."

The data fidelity challenge

Building such a comprehensive system isn't without its challenges. When asked about the biggest technical hurdle, Ruderman describes the challenge of ensuring that data is as accurate and timely as possible - "data fidelity by a thousand cuts."

"Even if you could somehow get an army of humans to quality check everything that exists today, the minute after they've checked that company, some key detail about it might have changed," he notes. "The hard problem is just trying to get to the asymptote—where 99% of the time you can count on this data being incredibly high quality, incredibly accurate, hard to disprove."

Grappling with taxonomy 

One of the more intriguing challenges in venture investing is the lack of standardization. Unlike public markets with their well-established classification systems, private market investors often have their own unique ways of categorizing companies and opportunities.  Categories are constantly getting disrupted, reshaped, or created in the startup environment.  This drives investors to define their own taxonomies and categories that they can shape at will, since they wouldn’t expect any single standard to keep pace with their view of the evolving landscape.

Harmonic's solution? Meet investors where they’re at, instead of trying to define the “one true standard.” As Ruderman puts it, "We’re experimenting with our customers to figure out the best ways to map their categories and definitions onto our data - this is one of the things we're most excited about. Maybe the thing we actually need is just better semantic search so people can come in and describe exactly the niche they’re looking for, even if they’d characterize it differently than they did yesterday.  For example, write  'carbon capture, climate tech' and just see all the companies that match. We’d also like customers to be able to bring in their taxonomy, and have the right labels applied to every company in Harmonic; AI is making this easier than ever."

The human element

While many startups embraced remote work during the pandemic, Harmonic's journey back to the office offers compelling insights into the value of in-person collaboration. Despite starting as a remote company, Harmonic has gradually shifted towards a hybrid model that emphasizes in-person interaction at their NYC and SF offices.

"You can still effectively build things and sell things remotely," Ruderman acknowledges, "but you just cannot have the same kind of unified, aligned, 'we're in this together' team in a remote setting." The transition wasn't forced—instead, the company noticed that employees were voluntarily coming to the office five days a week, "hungry for the social experience and the camaraderie."

Despite all the focus on data and technology, Ruderman emphasizes that success in this space comes down to people. "People eat process for breakfast," he says, explaining how early hiring mistakes led to overcomplicating operations. "If you're a small team and you find yourself needing to construct a lot of processes to get the team to execute, then something's probably broken."

"If you're trying to do a really, really hard thing with a group of people, your probability of success is higher if that group of people is really close," Ruderman explains, "and they're only going to be really close if you're around each other all the time."

The future of private market intelligence

As Harmonic continues to expand its coverage and capabilities, the broader implications for private markets become clearer. The traditional opacity of private markets isn't just an inconvenience—it's a barrier to efficient capital allocation and innovation.

By providing comprehensive, real-time intelligence about private companies (i.e. a complete index of startups), Harmonic is helping to level the playing field. While we're unlikely to see startup CEOs sharing their quarterly results on Twitter anytime soon, the days of private markets being information black holes are numbered.

For Ruderman and his team, this transformation isn't just about building a better database—it's about fundamentally changing how the innovation economy operates. As private markets become more transparent, the opportunities for investment, partnership, and growth will expand, potentially accelerating the pace of innovation across the entire ecosystem.

Whether you're a venture capitalist looking for the next unicorn, a corporate development team seeking acquisition targets, or a job seeker trying to identify promising opportunities, the increasing transparency in private markets—powered by companies like Harmonic—is making it easier to make informed decisions. And that's something worth harmonizing about.