B2B data for startups

Part of Solutions. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies. Free and Pro use the same API and the same MCP server.

The work you do

At a startup the person who needs data is usually a founder or one early sales hire, with no ops team and no data budget. Three jobs repeat.

• Build the first target lists. Turn your best guess at an ICP into filters, check how many people match, and pull a few hundred.
• Enrich who already showed up. Signups, waitlist entries and demo requests arrive with an email and little else. You need a title and the company behind it.
• Research an account before the call. Founder-led sales means you read about the company yourself, usually the night before.

How teams like yours use LeadOcean

1. Size a market before you spend a record

Counts are free. Send count=true as a query parameter on POST /v1/people/search with limit 1, or call the count_leads MCP tool. You get meta.total and no rows. The total is capped at 100,000.

curl -s "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jobLevel": ["C-Team"], "country": ["US"], "limit": 1}' | jq '.meta'

Narrow the filters until the number is a list you could actually work. Then pull it with search_leads, which costs one record per person returned. Use list_filters and list_enum_values to find exact values.

2. Enrich every signup

POST /v1/people/enrich takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id. Send the signup email and you get the person's title and company back. Set reveal_email to true only if you need an address.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email":"jane@acme.com"}'

A person we hold nothing for is a 404 and costs nothing. For the account side, POST /v1/companies/enrich takes a domain.

3. Research an account from Claude

The hosted MCP server at https://api.leadocean.io/mcp has 12 tools and signs in with OAuth, so no key is pasted into a config. get_company returns the account and search_leads returns the people to talk to.

Example prompt in Claude Code: "Look up acme.com and list the VPs and directors in sales." The Account Researcher skill runs that in a fixed order.

What it costs

There are two plans. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, no card, with the same API and MCP server as Pro. Pro is $499 a month, flat. See pricing.

A record is one person or company returned. Counts, filter lookups and a 404 on enrich are free. There is no per-record price, no credits and no overage invoice.

Worked example. A three-person team pulls 2,000 prospects, enriches 600 signups and looks up 200 companies in a month. That is 2,800 records, and Pro is still $499. If your first month is under 1,000 records, the Free plan covers it and you pay nothing.

The 1,000 free records are a pilot, not a monthly allowance. A very large month past the fair-usage line is paced to one request a minute until the reset, not cut off.

What it does not do

LeadOcean is data, not a sales stack. It has no sequencer, no dialer, no CRM and no Chrome extension. It has no table or workflow builder either.

The app at app.leadocean.io has an Exports page: a filter builder, a column picker, the record price before you start, and a CSV download. You bring the sending tool and the CRM.

Bounced emails are not refunded or credited back. Read email_status before you send. Revenue and funding fields are thin for small private companies, which includes most early-stage startups you will target.

Start here

• LeadOcean + Clay: enrich table rows with an HTTP API column.
• Build a lead list in Claude Code: count, search and spot-check over MCP.
• Account Researcher skill: a domain in, an account brief out.

Choosing a vendor? Read the best B2B data providers for startups and the best lead enrichment tools for startups. Selling to founders? See how to sell to a startup founder.

FAQ