# How Recent Funding sources and verifies startup funding data

> Where Recent Funding's companies and funding amounts come from, the rules that decide whether a news headline counts as a raise, and how reviews correct valuations and acquisition prices stored as rounds.

- URL: https://recentfunding.com/blog/how-recent-funding-sources-and-verifies-funding-data/
- Published: 2026-09-25
- Updated: 2026-10-30
- Data snapshot: 2026-10-09
- Tags: methodology, data quality, funding
- Publisher: Recent Funding (https://recentfunding.com/)

Recent Funding takes every funding round from a public source and links each amount to the page that reported it; an amount with no source is never published. As of October 9, 2026 it listed 30139 active companies, 7746 of them with a known amount for their latest round. Wrong amounts are corrected or cleared by review, and every change is recorded with the previous value.

## Where companies come from

Each time a source lists a company, Recent Funding stores a discovery record with the source name, URL and raw listing; a company found by several sources keeps all of them. The sources are funding announcement lists and feeds (`news:` keys), accelerator batch and portfolio pages (`accel:`, and `accel-watch:` for new batches), a startup gallery (`gallery:`), crypto fundraising sources (`dropstab`, `coincarp`, `crypto-fundraising`) and the enrichment pipeline (`pipeline`). The API's `sources` and `source_links` fields show which sources listed each company and where, and only records whose status is `active` are served.

## Stealth flags

A stealth flag (`flagged_at`) is the date a company was spotted before announcing anything. Most flag dates, and every `days_early` and follow count, come from a third-party stealth-startup tracker. Recent Funding's own stealth watch (`stealth:x-follows`: new X accounts that two or more tracked investors start to follow) adds the rest, and only those are Recent Funding's own discoveries. A daily cleanup takes companies off the stealth list when they turn out not to be in stealth (a token, a duplicate, an established company).

## Where amounts come from

A company's amount is the amount of its most recent round. `raise_provider` says how it was found:

- **Funding news lists** (`fundraisingfox`, `startupintros`, `startups-gallery`, `fundingly`, `siliconangle`, `stealth-news`, `feeds`, `apify`, `crypto-fundraising`): imported with the round; the source URL is the announcement.
- **Source listing** (`scan`): the fundraising source listed the amount; the source URL is the listing.
- **News headline** (`google-news`) and **company website** (`website`): found later by the enrichment pipeline; the source URL is the article or page.
- **Press** (`press`): an article found in review or a round check.
- **Manual review** (`agent-review`): a reviewer confirmed a match the pipeline had held back, citing a page.

Companies with an amount, by how it was found:

| Provider | Companies |
| --- | --- |
| fundraisingfox (`fundraisingfox`) | 4141 |
| startupintros (`startupintros`) | 1304 |
| startups-gallery (`startups-gallery`) | 622 |
| News headline (`google-news`) | 619 |
| press (`press`) | 395 |
| Source listing (`scan`) | 239 |
| fundingly (`fundingly`) | 108 |
| siliconangle (`siliconangle`) | 98 |
| feeds (`feeds`) | 87 |
| apify (`apify`) | 46 |
| crypto-fundraising (`crypto-fundraising`) | 28 |
| stealth-news (`stealth-news`) | 22 |
| Company website (`website`) | 20 |
| Manual review (`agent-review`) | 17 |

7634 amounts in the snapshot have a source URL. 112 have none: the site shows them without a SOURCE link and this blog leaves them out of every table.

## How headlines are matched

The enrichment pipeline (`scripts/enrich-funding.mjs`) runs daily on companies whose latest round has no amount. It tries the company's own website first (only first-person claims such as "we raised"), then news headlines where the company is the subject, then the round's source page.

A headline counts only as `<Name> raises <amount>` (or secures, lands, closes, emerges from stealth with) or `<Name>: <amount> Seed…`, and:

- Debt, loans, credit facilities, IPOs, bonds, grants, token sales, buybacks and contracts are not venture rounds.
- A valuation is not a raise: in `raises $100M at $4B valuation` only the first number counts.
- Names must match exactly with their capital letter, and a capitalised word before the name means a longer name ("Electric Twin" is not Twin).
- Short or common one-word names also need topic words that fit the company's industry.

Only high-confidence matches are written, each with an evidence row (provider, publisher, URL, headline, rule, pipeline version, competing amounts). Weaker matches go to review. A failed or throttled lookup is never recorded as "no raise found". A rejected claim (the same company with the same amount) is blocked from every outlet, so a repeated wire story cannot bring it back, and precision is reported per provider, publisher, rule and version.

## Review corrections

Reviews (`scripts/apply-review.mjs`, which records the reviewer as an AI agent) fix records that look like raises but are not:

- **Valuations** move to a separate valuation field. Cumulative totals, another company's round, acquisition prices, debt and figures quoted in tweets are replaced by the real amount when known, otherwise cleared, so the site shows unknown rather than wrong.
- **Other currencies** read as dollars are converted (260 million yen had been stored as 260 million dollars).
- **Duplicates** are merged, and **non-startups** (people, investment firms) leave the site.
- **X accounts** that belong to a founder or another company stop being the company's handle.

Every correction keeps the previous value, the verdict, a note and the source URL, so it can be audited and undone. Large early amounts that review has not confirmed yet are listed for checking: 100 million USD or more at pre-seed, seed, stealth or an unknown stage, 250 million at Series A, 500 million at any stage.

## Known limitations

- **Stage labels come from the sources**, which disagree on what counts as seed.
- **A company's amount is its latest round**; `/api/v1/companies/{slug}` returns every round.
- **The same company can appear twice** under two spellings until a merge catches it.
- **A missing amount means unknown**, not zero.

## Check it yourself

Each company's `raise_source_url`, `raise_publisher` and `raise_provider` say where its amount came from, and the company endpoint lists every round with its own source ([API docs](https://recentfunding.com/docs/)):

```sh
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $RF_KEY" "https://recentfunding.com/api/v1/companies/architect"
```

## Related on Recent Funding

- [Startup funding data: the last 30 days in charts](https://recentfunding.com/data/)
- [Recently funded startups, updated daily](https://recentfunding.com/)
- [Money flow: raises, acquisitions and new funds](https://recentfunding.com/money-flow/)
- [Startup funding this week: the startups that raised, Oct 26–Nov 2, 2026](https://recentfunding.com/blog/startup-funding-week-of-2026-10-26/)
- [AI investors: the VC firms and accelerators backing the most AI startups](https://recentfunding.com/blog/ai-investors/)
- [Game startups: the gaming startups that raised most recently](https://recentfunding.com/blog/game-startups/)
- [Recent Funding API docs](https://recentfunding.com/docs/): every endpoint behind this post; a [free API key](https://recentfunding.com/dashboard/?from=blog-related) takes just an email