CB Insights has raised $10 million in Series A funding from the low-flying, bi-coastal growth stage investment firm Pilot Growth Equity.

CB Insights, a nearly six-year-old, New York-based research outfit whose private company data and analysis has become oft-cited in media reports about the startup industry, has raised $10 million in Series A funding from the low-flying, bi-coastal growth stage investment firm Pilot Growth Equity

According to CEO and cofounder Anand Sanwal, the money represents CB Insights’s first equity round. The 61-person company had previously raised $1.15 million in grants from the National Science Foundation for its private company scoring software, called Mosaic.

The funding isn’t a complete surprise, given the venture capital that has flowed recently to other startups focused on private company data and analysis, including our own sister company, CrunchBase, which closed on roughly $6 million in funding from Emergence Capital Partners in September; and Mattermark, which closed on a $6.5 million Series A round led by Foundry Group last December.

Still, Sanwal had been fairly public about running a largely bootstrapped company that was “revenue funded” and not supported instead by investor dollars. Asked why the company changed its mind, he says Pilot Growth is a longtime customer of CB Insights that reached out “probably two years ago” about a potential investment. As the two sides exchanged product and market ideas over time, both decided to move forward with a deal that’s “simple and fair to everyone,” Sanwal says.