Methodology — Estimates, Coverage, and Sourcing

What this site is

Venture Capital Tracker is a founder-oriented directory of venture funds, startups that raised, city hubs, glossary explainers, and funding news. It is not investment advice, a live proprietary deal database, or a substitute for firm disclosures, filings, or counsel.

How check-size estimates work

Many fund profiles show a typical check size label. Unless a firm-specific band is documented in our coverage notes:

  1. We infer a stage bucket from the rounds a fund leads (else the rounds it invests in): Series A / Seed / Pre-Seed.
  2. We map that bucket to a planning band (for example, seed → $250K–$3M (stage-based estimate)).
  3. Labels always include wording such as stage-based estimate, early-stage estimate, or coverage-cited when a narrower band comes from our research notes.

Midpoints used only for directory sorting live in the same estimate-rules module as the labels. Do not treat either figure as a firm’s disclosed policy.

Implementation: src/utils/estimate-rules.ts (consumed by fund pages, Markdown mirrors, and tools).

Coverage status

Startup profiles may be marked full or stub. City hubs may list coverage gaps. Stub pages are honest placeholders: they should not invent AUM, traction, or rankings.

News and listicles

Dated roundups and ranking posts state their ranking criterion in the opening (for example AUM vs activity). Volatile claims on evergreen guides should carry a last verified date and a sources list when numbers are asserted. Flash news items are date-led and may not carry the same verification fields.

Glossary

Glossary pages follow docs/glossary/WRITING_BRIEF.md: answer-first definitions, no invented statistics, optional FAQs and sources.

Machine-readable exports

We generate agent-facing surfaces from the same sources as HTML:

  • /llms.txt — content index
  • /*.md, /fund/{id}.md, /startup/{id}.md, /glossary/{term}.md — Markdown mirrors
  • /api/directory.json and /.well-known/api-catalog — structured directory access

Interactive calculators document formulas on their landing pages; published article examples must use the same calculation functions.

What we never invent

  • Fake rankings or fabricated AUM
  • Survey percentages without a dated source
  • Guaranteed fund interest or returns

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