We monitor thousands of online sources to identify equity investments, but unannounced fundraisings make up over 50% of all UK fundraisings so we have developed a clever system that detects them. The top-level process is the following:
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We monitor all SH01s filed with Companies House in the UK.
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An algorithm decides whether any of those looks like it contains genuine investment.
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A human analyst investigates whether the algorithm correctly identified genuine investment.
Our system scours SH01s daily and identifies c.95% of the forms containing investment. But identifying genuine investment is only half the work, we still need to decide how to interpret the data.
When linking announced fundraisings with SH01s (say, to calculate valuation), we can match the forms with details in an announcement, including the date and announced invested amounts. But where we’re dealing with unannounced fundraisings, we need to make harder choices about which SH01s are part of the same investment round, and which date we ought to choose as the date of the deal.