Hunter

Hunter.io is the email finding and verification tool Antoine Finkelstein and François Grante bootstrapped from Paris in 2015. It lets sales professionals, recruiters, and marketers find the email address of any professional by entering their name and company domain — powered by a database of 200M+ email addresses collected from public web sources. Hunter grew to $15M+ ARR with a team of 30 by charging for API calls and bulk searches while offering a generous free tier of 25 searches per month. The product grew through a classic freemium B2B loop: individual sales reps discovered Hunter during prospecting, used the free tier daily, and then their company's sales operations team signed up for the Business plan to run bulk searches across prospect lists. Hunter's Chrome extension (show email addresses directly on a company's website or LinkedIn profile) became its most viral feature — downloaded by 600,000+ users who became daily active users with zero paid acquisition.