Launched this week
Alumni Founder
The tool that maps founder networks for any company
358 followers
The tool that maps founder networks for any company
358 followers
Enter any company or university and see the complete founder network it produced. Who spun out, how they're connected, how strong those connections are, and how much they've raised - mapped as a live visual graph. Used by VCs for deal sourcing, sales teams for warm intros, and founders looking for co-founders.
Crustdata
Hey PH! 👋
Mapping founder networks is one of those things that sounds simple but is actually a massive pain. You're bouncing between LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Google trying to piece together who came out of a company, what they built, and how they're connected and you still end up with an incomplete picture.
Alumni Finder does it in one shot. Enter any company and it instantly maps the entire founder alumni network as a visual graph.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Type in Stripe and you'll see Daniela Amodei (Anthropic), Anurag Goel (Render), Jenn Knight (AgentSync) - all former Stripe employees who went on to raise hundreds of millions. You can see who overlapped with who, which teams they came from, and whether their connection is strong (same team, same time) or partial (same company, different era).
The graph shows:
🌐 Full founder alumni network - every founder that spun out of a company or university
🔗 Connection strength - strong overlap (same team, same tenure) vs. partial overlap (same company, different time)
💰 Funding raised - so you know who built something real
🏆 Cross-company benchmarks - compare which orgs produce the strongest founder networks side by side
A few ways people are using it:
VCs use it to source deals from specific talent pipelines - type in Palantir or Stripe and see every founder that came out, how much they've raised, and whether they overlap with your existing portfolio.
Sales teams use it to map warm intro paths into target accounts - find a former colleague who now works at the company you're trying to get into.
Founders use it to find co-founders - see who from your old company has already made the leap into startups.
Angels and scouts use it to get ahead of deal flow - spot emerging founders from strong talent pipelines before they're on everyone's radar.
Corp dev teams use it to track where talent from acquired companies landed and what they built next.
And a lot of people just use it for fun too by finding who in their alma mater have become founders!
Check it out here: https://tools.crustdata.com
Let us know if you have any feedback!
Many congratulations @nithish_a1 @mhimed and team! :)
This is a such a smart way to productize something everyone in tech talks about (PayPal mafia, Stripe alumni, YC networks) but almost no one can actually map without a ton of manual digging.
What gets me most excited about Alumni Founder is that it turns those loose “founder lore” stories into a living, queryable graph you can actually use for work whether you’re a VC sourcing from specific talent pipelines, a sales team hunting for warm intros, or a founder looking for your next co-founder from a past company or alma mater.
The ability to see overlap strength (same team, same time, etc.) plus funding raised makes these networks immediately actionable, not just pretty visualizations.
Huge kudos to the @Crustdata team for shipping this. It feels like a foundational infrastructure layer for anyone who believes the next generation of iconic companies will come out of today’s best talent hubs. Super excited to be hunting this one! :)
Crustdata
@mhimed @rohanrecommends Thanks Rohan! Very excited to see how folks use this tool!
Are we also able to find the emails and phone contacts of them??
Crustdata
@himani_sah1 We have emails and phone contacts in our API, unfortunately, its not available in the tool at the moment.
ProdShort
I remember back then when I was choosing schools, we were doing that with completely random information from random websites. As a founder I would have loved to compare schools by the amount that has the most active alumni community and of founders and the one that produced more founders
@bengeekly I had this exact same thought. In addition to the use cases @nithish_a1 listed, being able to visualize an actual network isn't just useful for professionals but students and juniors as well.
Crustdata
@bengeekly Hey Ben thanks for this feedback. Coming soon maybe 👀
Reminds me a little of another startup called Interlink but their use case is helping (mostly young) candidates recruit better by minimizing time spent in the Handshake>LinkedIn>Gmail>Networking Call>Interview>Job twister.
I like the use case here and definitely think it could be helpful to map university networks for younger college grads.
Love the time-to-value. Some of the results are inaccurate though. How fresh is the data?
the paypal mafia and stripe alumni stuff is talked about constantly but nobody could actually map it without spending a weekend on linkedin and crunchbase. turning that into a live graph with overlap strength and funding context is genuinely useful, not just a cool visualization. excited to see what people surface with it.
cool stuff !!
Crustdata
@saad_el_gueddari Thanks!