We integrated 40+ providers to build the ColdIQ API.
The process taught us how B2B data breaks down in practice. Buyers talk about "data" as one thing, but the work splits into 8 distinct layers, and each layer has its own specialized providers.
Miss a layer and your outbound inherits a blind spot. You undercount your market, or you build a list you can't reach, or your email lands weeks after the buying moment passed.
Here are the 8 layers, the providers behind each, and how they combine into one workflow you can run through Claude Code.
1. TAM Mapping
Providers: Apollo.io, AI Ark, DiscoLike.
This is where your list starts. TAM mapping answers the questions that decide whether a campaign is worth running: who exists in your category, how big the market is, and how many people you can expect to reach.
Apollo.io covers the broad B2B company and contact database. AI Ark and DiscoLike extend coverage into segments where standard industry filters fall short, surfacing companies by what they do rather than by the label a database assigned them.
We size the market at this layer before writing a single email. If the addressable list comes back too small, the campaign dies here instead of wasting a month of sending.
2. Lookalikes
Provider: CompanyEnrich.
Feed it your best-fit accounts and it returns ranked similar companies through the API. Tight lists come from here.
This layer works because your closed-won customers encode your real ICP better than any filter combination. Similarity expansion from a seed set of proven accounts surfaces fits that an industry-and-headcount filter would never find.
We built a free mini tool on the same mechanic. You can find companies similar to your best customers to scale your pipeline:
Lookalike Finder Tool
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Quick examples:
3. Local
Provider: Openmart.
Mainstream databases go thin below mid-market. Restaurants, clinics, contractors, gyms, local agencies: the businesses that dominate SMB selling barely register in the standard B2B databases.
Openmart fills that gap with local business data. If you sell to SMBs, this is the layer everyone else skips, which makes it an advantage for the teams that use it.
4. People Enrichment
Providers: FullEnrich, Prospeo, BlitzAPI.
Emails, mobiles, and profile resolution. Company data tells you who to target. This layer tells you how to reach them.
The reason you need three providers instead of one: no single source has complete coverage, and single-source contact data leaves a large share of your list unreachable.
Running a waterfall across FullEnrich, Prospeo, and BlitzAPI means one provider's miss becomes the next provider's catch.
The same waterfall mechanic powers our free email tool. You can find verified email addresses for your target accounts here, for free:
Email Finder Tool
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5. Signals
Providers: PredictLeads, TheirStack.
Funding rounds, hiring spikes, leadership changes. This layer marks the shift from "find leads" to "find leads showing intent right now."
A company that just raised, just hired a new VP of Sales, or just posted five SDR openings has budget and urgency that a static list can never show you.
PredictLeads and TheirStack surface those events as structured data you can filter and trigger on.
6. Technographic
Providers: BuiltWith, TheirStack, Sumble.
Each provider reads a different surface. BuiltWith reads the website itself, so you get the tracking pixel, which means you know what provider they used to build it.
TheirStack reads job postings, where engineers name the tools they use internally. Sumble rounds out coverage where the other two miss.
Knowing a company's stack changes the message you send. A team running your competitor's product gets a different email than a team running nothing at all.
If you want to know what tools and technologies a company is already using, you can check here:
Tech Stack Finder Tool
Quick examples:
7. Discovery
Providers: Exa, Limadata, Serper.
When the company is too new or too niche to be in any database yet, you search the live web at scale instead.
Exa runs semantic search over the web, Serper gives you programmatic access to search results, and Limadata combines search with enrichment.
Together they catch the long tail that every database misses by definition, because databases only contain what has already been indexed.
8. Orchestration: One API Key
Provider: the ColdIQ API Marketplace.
We integrated all 17 tools above, plus 22 more. 40+ providers, under one API key.
What that unlocks:
→ Waterfall across every layer instead of betting on a single provider
→ Swap providers without touching your code
→ Stop maintaining eight separate integrations, keys, and billing relationships
This is the infrastructure behind the unified API we announced. The full context on what we are building and why is in We're Launching a Unified API for GTM.
Before wiring any of this together, it helps to know which layers your current motion is missing. Our GTM report analyzes your company and shows where your approach stands.
If you want to understand where your GTM motion stands today, see below how your current approach compares to these specialized models:
GTM Report Tool
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