TechCrunch covers maybe a few dozen funding rounds a week. The SEC receives hundreds of Form D filings every business day. The gap between those two numbers is information almost nobody is looking at.
What a Form D actually is
When a US company raises capital privately under Regulation D - the exemption behind virtually all startup rounds - it must file a Form D with the SEC within 15 days of the first sale. The filing is public, structured XML in EDGAR, and contains the company, its industry, the amount offered and sold, the type of securities, the minimum investment, the number of investors already in, and the executives and directors behind the company.
In other words: the official record of a raise, often days before any coverage - and for the majority of raises that never get covered, the only record there will ever be.
The catch nobody mentions: funds
Here is what every raw Form D scraper gets wrong. By filing count, most Form Ds are not startups - they are pooled investment funds: hedge funds, PE vehicles and VC funds raising their own capital, often as endless series ("Fund V, Series 39"). If you do not filter those, your "startup funding feed" is mostly fund-administration noise.
The fix is in the filing itself: fund offerings declare the industry group "Pooled Investment Fund" and claim the Investment Company Act 3C exemption. Classify on those two fields and the noise drops away.
What a filtered, scored day looks like
A real scan of one recent EDGAR day, operating companies only, $1M+ (from the Startup Funding Monitor):
| Score | Amount | Industry | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $339.6M | Other Energy | EnerVenue Holdings |
| 100 | $270.5M | Other Technology | CesiumAstro |
| 86 | $30.5M | REITS and Finance | Brixmor Operating Partnership |
| 81 | $11.6M | Insurance | HMA II |
| 75 | $10.4M | Other Technology | Curiosities Inc. |
CesiumAstro (space communications) and EnerVenue (energy storage): nine-figure raises, with named executives parsed from the filings, visible in EDGAR before mainstream coverage. The score blends amount (log-scaled), new filing vs amendment, equity vs debt and freshness of the first sale.
Why this beats news-based funding feeds
- Coverage: news-based feeds only know what a journalist wrote up. Form D captures raises no outlet covers - regional companies, insurance, energy, industrial tech.
- Timing: the filing precedes coverage when coverage exists at all.
- Structure: amounts come from XML fields, not from parsing "raised eight figures" out of a headline.
- Provenance: every record links to the SEC filing itself.
The honest limits: Form D only covers Regulation D offerings (some raises use other routes), filings can lag the first sale by up to 15 days, and amounts reflect what is reported at filing time.
Do it yourself or as a feed
The source is free: EDGAR publishes a daily index of all filings, and each Form D contains a structured primary_doc.xml. You will need to handle the index format, the fund classification, "Indefinite" offering amounts and SEC fair-access rate limits.
Or skip the plumbing: the Startup Funding Monitor does the scan as a feed - $0.20 for a full ranked day of analyzed filings, JSON out, with the fund filter, scoring and executives included. AI agents can call it through our free MCP server ("who raised more than $10M this week?"), and it chains naturally into the Form 4 insider scanner and 13D/G activist monitor for the full money-flow picture.
Data for research, screening and monitoring - not investment advice.
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