The Complete Guide to Free Data Sources for AI Intelligence Platforms

Executive Summary

Building a data intelligence platform doesn't require million-dollar data licensing deals. This guide catalogs 47 free data sources across 8 categories that can power startup intelligence, funding tracking, AI research monitoring, and B2B discovery platforms.

🎯 Quick Reference: Priority Sources

1. 📊 Funding & Investment Data

SEC EDGAR (US Filings)

• Every US company raising >$1M must file within 15 days
• Contains: Company name, amount raised, investor names, use of funds
• ~50,000 Form D filings per year

# Search Form D filings
curl "https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index?q=form-d&dateRange=custom&startdt=2026-01-01&enddt=2026-03-04"

Full-text search
curl "https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index?q=artificial%20intelligence&forms=D"

https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&type=D&company=&dateb=&owner=include&count=100&output=atom

OpenCorporates

• Company name, registration number, status
• Incorporation date, jurisdiction
• Officers and directors
• Registered address
• Filings history

curl "https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/companies/search?q=artificial+intelligence&jurisdiction_code=in"

India MCA (Ministry of Corporate Affairs)

• MCA21 portal requires login
• Data available via RTI (Right to Information) requests
• Third-party aggregators: Tofler, Zauba Corp

• https://www.tofler.in
• Free tier: 5 company views/day
• Has unofficial API

AngelList/Wellfound

• /jobs - Job listings with company data
• /company/{slug} - Company profiles
• Employee count changes over time

2. 🧠 AI & Research Intelligence

arXiv API

• cs.AI - Artificial Intelligence
• cs.LG - Machine Learning
• cs.CL - Computation and Language (NLP)
• cs.CV - Computer Vision
• stat.ML - Statistics/ML

# Recent AI papers
curl "http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=cat:cs.AI&start=0&max_results=100&sortBy=submittedDate&sortOrder=descending"

curl "http://export.arxiv.org/oai2?verb=ListRecords&set=cs&metadataPrefix=arXiv"

Semantic Scholar API

• SPECTER2 embeddings (find similar papers)
• Citation contexts
• Author disambiguation
• Venue normalization

# Search papers
curl "https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search?query=large+language+models&limit=10&fields=title,authors,year,citationCount"

Hugging Face Hub API

• Model cards and metadata
• Dataset cards
• Paper references
• Download counts
• Trending models

Papers With Code

• Papers: https://paperswithcode.com/media/about/papers-with-abstracts.json.gz
• Methods: https://paperswithcode.com/media/about/methods.json.gz
• Datasets: https://paperswithcode.com/media/about/datasets.json.gz

Crossref

# Recent AI works
curl "https://api.crossref.org/works?query=artificial+intelligence&filter=from-pub-date:[email protected]"

3. 🚀 Startup & Product Launches

Product Hunt API

• Posts (launches)
• Topics (categories)
• Users (makers)
• Collections

HackerNews API (Algolia)

# Search stories
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=YC+launch&tags=story"

Search by date
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=Series+A&tags=story"

Front page items
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page"

# Real-time top stories
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json"

Item details
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json"

Reddit API

• Launch announcements
• Product feedback sentiment
• Competitor mentions
• Hiring posts

4. 📰 News & Events

GDELT (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone)

• News from 100+ languages
• Events, themes, emotions
• Geographic tagging
• 215+ years historical

SELECT * FROM gdelt-bq.full.events
WHERE SQLDATE >= 20260301
AND Actor1Name LIKE '%artificial intelligence%'
LIMIT 100

GlobeNewswire RSS

• All news: https://www.globenewswire.com/RssFeed/feedTitle/GlobeNewswire
• Technology: https://www.globenewswire.com/RssFeed/industry/30-Technology/feedTitle/Technology
• M&A: https://www.globenewswire.com/RssFeed/subjectcode/25-Mergers%20and%20Acquisitions/

BusinessWire RSS

NewsAPI

5. 💼 Jobs & Hiring Signals

RemoteOK API

curl "https://remoteok.com/api" -H "User-Agent: YourApp/1.0"

• Company name
• Position
• Tags (skills)
• Date posted
• Salary (when available)

GitHub Jobs (Deprecated) → Alternatives

LinkedIn (Scraping)

• Company employee counts (growth signal)
• Job postings (hiring = funding)
• "Excited to announce" posts (funding news)
• Skills/tech stack data

• Proxycurl (paid API): https://nubela.co/proxycurl
• Phantombuster (automation): https://phantombuster.com
• Apify actors: https://apify.com/store

6. 🏛️ Government & Regulatory Data

India Data.gov.in

• Company registrations (MCA)
• GST registrations
• Import/export data
• Startup India registrations

USPTO PatentsView

curl "https://search.patentsview.org/api/v1/patent/?q={\"patent_title\":\"machine learning\"}&f=[\"patent_number\",\"patent_title\",\"patent_date\"]"

European Patent Office (EPO)

7. 🐙 Code & Developer Activity

GitHub API

# Trending (unofficial)
curl "https://api.gitterapp.com/repositories?language=python&since=daily"

Search repos
curl "https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=llm+language:python&sort=stars&order=desc"

User/org activity
curl "https://api.github.com/users/{username}/events"

• Star velocity → project traction
• Fork activity → adoption
• Contributor growth → team scaling
• Dependency usage → tech adoption

GitLab API

npm Registry

# Package metadata
curl "https://registry.npmjs.org/{package}"

Download counts
curl "https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-month/{package}"

PyPI (Python Package Index)

# Package metadata
curl "https://pypi.org/pypi/{package}/json"

8. 🌍 Alternative Data Sources

CommonCrawl

Kaggle Datasets

• Crunchbase snapshots (historical)
• LinkedIn company data
• GitHub activity
• AngelList data

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

# Check availability
curl "http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=example.com"

CDX API for bulk
curl "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=*.example.com&output=json"

📋 Signup Checklist

Here's what to sign up for to get started:

Tier 1: Essential (Sign up today)

Tier 2: Nice to Have

Tier 3: Consider Later

🛠️ Implementation Notes

Recommended Tech Stack for Ingestion

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                     INGESTION LAYER                      │
├───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┤
│   Scheduled   │   Webhooks    │     RSS       │  Manual │
│   (cron)      │   (realtime)  │   (polling)   │  (bulk) │
└───────┬───────┴───────┬───────┴───────┬───────┴────┬────┘
│               │               │            │
└───────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┘
│
┌──────────▼──────────┐
│   PostgreSQL + FTS  │
│   (unified store)   │
└──────────┬──────────┘
│
┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
│                │                │
┌──────▼──────┐  ┌──────▼──────┐  ┌──────▼──────┐
│   GraphQL   │  │  Dashboard  │  │  Webhooks   │
│     API     │  │     UI      │  │   (alerts)  │
└─────────────┘  └─────────────┘  └─────────────┘

Database Schema (Simplified)

-- Core entities
CREATE TABLE companies (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
name TEXT NOT NULL,
domain TEXT,
jurisdiction TEXT,
founded_date DATE,
employee_count INT,
funding_total BIGINT,
last_funding_date DATE,
tech_stack TEXT[],
sources JSONB,
created_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT NOW(),
updated_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT NOW()
);

CREATE TABLE funding_rounds (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
company_id INT REFERENCES companies(id),
amount BIGINT,
currency TEXT DEFAULT 'USD',
round_type TEXT, -- seed, series_a, etc
announced_date DATE,
investors TEXT[],
source TEXT, -- sec_edgar, news, etc
source_url TEXT,
raw_data JSONB
);

CREATE TABLE papers (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
arxiv_id TEXT UNIQUE,
title TEXT NOT NULL,
abstract TEXT,
authors JSONB,
categories TEXT[],
published_date DATE,
citation_count INT,
embeddings VECTOR(768) -- for similarity search
);

CREATE TABLE launches (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
source TEXT, -- producthunt, hackernews
source_id TEXT,
name TEXT,
tagline TEXT,
url TEXT,
upvotes INT,
comments INT,
launched_at TIMESTAMPTZ,
topics TEXT[]
);

🔗 Related Resources

• SEC EDGAR Full-Text Search: https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index
• arXiv Bulk Access: https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html
• GDELT BigQuery: https://blog.gdeltproject.org/google-bigquery-gkg/
• GitHub Trending (Unofficial): https://github.com/huchenme/github-trending-api

Next Steps