Harmonic and Grata both provide private company intelligence, but they are built for different buyers.
Harmonic serves teams looking to invest in, acquire, partner with or sell to startups. They benefit from deep coverage of early-stage companies and the people behind them, with data on more than 35 million companies and over 195 million individual profiles.
Grata serves PE and M&A teams sourcing established, founder-owned businesses in the middle market, with particular depth in private company financials and transaction data.
Choosing the right platform for your team depends on the age and type of companies you are sourcing, and your preferred method of moving deals forward. Here, explore each tool in depth and learn what to look for when making a selection.
Harmonic vs. Grata: At-a-glance comparison
What is Harmonic?
Harmonic is a startup discovery engine with proprietary data on more than 35 million companies and over 195 million people. The platform serves venture capital and growth investors alongside corporate development teams and GTM teams selling into startups.
Harmonic gives users access to both company data and people data at every level of the org chart, which means investors can evaluate teams by background and expertise rather than relying on firmographics alone. Because the data extends to individual signals across the full organizational chart, teams can track founder activity before new projects surface publicly, assess talent density as part of diligence, identify businesses primed for scaling after key hires, and surface candidates for portfolio company roles.
What is Scout?
Scout is Harmonic's AI agent that crawls its proprietary private market data, the public web and your firm's network, surfacing both cold and warm introduction paths. Scout supports natural language queries, meaning that you can describe an investment thesis or a strategic mandate, and Scout will return evaluated results rather than keyword matches.
What is Grata?
Grata is a private market intelligence platform built for dealmakers. PE firms and investment banks use it to source middle-market companies for M&A transactions.
The platform tracks more than 19 million private companies and 8 million executive contacts. It also has data on over 800,000 financial transactions, including PE acquisitions and VC rounds. Grata claims strong adoption among top PE firms and management consulting firms.
Grata's strength lies in the middle market: established, often founder-owned businesses in traditional and specialized industries. The platform provides revenue estimates and EBITDA figures for private companies, alongside ownership structures and precedent transaction comps that let dealmakers build valuation frameworks. A dealmaker network with live deal teasers from sell-side advisors adds an inbound deal flow layer on top of outbound sourcing, and conference tracking across more than 25,000 events gives PE teams a structured way to source from industry gatherings.
Feature-by-feature breakdown
Data coverage
Harmonic covers the full startup lifecycle, with greater depth at the stealth and pre-seed stages than tools that focus on later stages. Unlike databases that rely solely on public sources, Harmonic also takes in data directly from founder submissions and second-party partners, including venture firms and all major accelerators. Harmonic receives a constant flow of portfolio updates from the world’s leading investors, giving it early, accurate coverage of companies that have not yet appeared in public registries or press.
An Earlybird VC benchmark of 1,000 companies showed that Harmonic tracks 98% of relevant signals for stealth-to-growth-stage startups.
Grata's database skews toward established middle-market businesses, including founder-owned companies and bootstrapped operations that may never raise venture capital. This database focus supports PE firms targeting businesses with existing revenue and identifiable ownership structures.
People data
Harmonic tracks over 195 million profiles across all seniority levels. With this level of data, investors can assess a company's technical depth and team composition instead of just pinpointing its executives. Tracking talent at the individual level also makes it possible to identify founders before a company exists, since operators often signal their next move through job changes or LinkedIn activity before making any public announcement. Scout searches across all this data in natural language, so you can use specific queries to find precisely the contact you need. This feature has been found especially useful by PE teams, which use Scout queries to find the talent for portfolio companies.
Grata tracks more than 8 million executive contacts, the type of data that PE deal sourcing teams need, as outreach typically starts with the CEO or CFO. Grata's people data does not extend to technical teams or operators.
AI and research capabilities
Harmonic's Scout handles open-ended, natural language research queries that can drill down on specific investment criteria or strategic questions. Users receive a curated, evaluated set of results. For corp dev teams responding to ad-hoc mandates or VCs exploring an unfamiliar market, Scout compresses weeks of manual research into a single conversation.
Grata's agentic AI search is optimized for M&A sourcing. It helps dealmakers identify acquisition targets matching specific criteria within Grata's middle-market database. The tool is better suited to structured, repeatable queries where the thesis is defined and the goal is to build a target list.
Private company financials and deal data
Grata provides revenue estimates and ownership structures for private companies, alongside information on more than 800,000 transactions with precedent comps for valuation work. Grata's financial data supports M&A teams performing due diligence on estimates and comparable deals.
Harmonic focuses on funding data and growth signals rather than financial estimates. Harmonic tracks the full history of a company's funding rounds, including amounts and investors, but does not provide revenue or EBITDA estimates, beyond estimations made by its agent, Scout
Conference intelligence and deal flow
Grata generates alerts from the attendee lists of more than 25,000 conferences, and its dealmaker network surfaces live deal teasers from sell-side advisors, supporting PE teams that source at industry events or rely on banker relationships.
Harmonic maps the 200 most important conferences for early- and growth-stage investors, tracking which founders and companies attend and surfacing signals that emerge from those events, so that Harmonic users can act on this intelligence.
Data freshness
Harmonic refreshes company and people data on a cohort-based cycle, with thousands of priority companies updated daily. Grata does not publicly specify its refresh cadence.
For investors tracking fast-moving startups, data freshness directly affect on decision quality. When investors reference stale data, they risk acting on signals that don’t reflect reality.
Integrations
Harmonic is compatible with all CRMs via Polytomic and has a native Affinity integration. The API supports custom workflows, and Harmonic recently launched an MCP for connecting to any LLM.
Grata integrates with Salesforce and HubSpot as well as DealCloud, and offers data warehouse delivery via Snowflake for enterprise data infrastructure needs.
Which platform is right for you?
For VCs and growth investors
For VCs and growth investors, Harmonic is the stronger fit. The database covers the full investment lifecycle with consistent depth, and over 195 million people profiles make it possible to track founder activity before new projects surface publicly. Scout handles thesis-driven research and company evaluation through natural language, so teams can move from a market question to a ranked set of opportunities without manual research. And because Harmonic integrates your firm's full network, warm paths into the most relevant founders surface automatically.
For PE and M&A teams
For PE and M&A teams, Grata's private company financial data and sell-side deal network are built around the PE and M&A workflow, and its conference intelligence adds a structured sourcing layer. Harmonic supports PE teams whose mandates include tech-enabled or AI-native targets, where coverage depth and team-level people data change what is possible in sourcing and diligence. PE teams can also use Harmonic’s Scout to identify vendors and talent for their portfolio companies, drawing on the platform’s people database to surface candidates and service providers that fit specific criteria.
For corporate development
The right choice depends on your target profiles. Grata suits corp dev teams at large enterprises running structured M&A processes focused on mature, founder-owned businesses.
Harmonic supports corp dev teams whose mandates include AI-native targets. Companies building at the technology frontier are inherently only a few years old, which means they often don’t yet appear in traditional M&A databases. Scout can map a new market and surface acquisition targets against specific criteria in minutes, speeding up the search for teams with broad mandates and limited time for systematic sourcing.
For GTM teams
Harmonic tracks hiring events and funding rounds as they happen, so GTM teams can time outreach to the moment a company is most likely to buy. Harmonic's people data identifies the right contact at every level of an organization, so your team can reach its target contact without passing through general inboxes first.
Grata does not position itself as a GTM prospecting tool.
Ready to see how Harmonic covers your market? Book a demo and search your own pipeline in the platform.
