After much anticipation, CrunchBase announced on stage at Disrupt yesterday that it's officially spinning out of AOL/Verizon to become an independent company.

We're beyond excited to (finally!) confirm the news, and welcome Jager McConnell, former VP of Product at Salesforce, as the new CEO of CrunchBase.

Funding the expansion of indie CrunchBase is Emergence Capital, one of the Valley's top cloud and enterprise services funds that includes Box, Yammer, and Salesforce among its big exits. It's a logical fit as we continue to reinvent the way people find and leverage company data.

Today, CrunchBase counts 2 million unique visitors per month and profiles more than 860,000 startups, investors, and people in its database. It's a pretty sweet profile for what started in 2007 as Michael Arrington's homegrown project to index startups featured in TechCrunch articles.

We owe a big thank you to the community of contributors that has put us at the center of the startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem. We also owe a big thanks to AOL, which saw the potential in CrunchBase, invested in the team over the past two years, and approved the spinout. And of course none of this would have happened without our excellent colleagues at TechCrunch, with whom we will continue to work as we have before.

So wish us well on this new chapter for CrunchBase.

-- The CrunchBase Team

Any questions? Find us on Twitter, or drop us a line at feedback@crunchbase.com.