Raises methodology

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Methodology

The process for adding raises is completely manual and there's no part of it that is automated, we manually review all raises before adding them to our database.

We started with a completely empty database on September 2022 and since then we've been filling it from data from the following sources:

• Since we started tracking raises, we've manually added any new raises we see announced on twitter or in any other medium, such as news sites. There's multiple people in our team dedicated to this so I think we're pretty exhaustive.
• To backfill data on previous raises, we've searched for all articles on crypto news pages (such as coindesk, theblock...) that contain keywords such as "raise", "ICO", "investment" or other terms that are typically associated with raise announcements, and then we reviewed each of those to see if they were a raise announcement, and if so added the info from in manually into our DB.
• We have multiple buttons in our site that our users can use to report a raise that we are missing or report incorrect details about raises, we use this user feedback to add raises we've missed after someone in our team verifies them manually.
• We've gone through the portfolio pages of multiple funds/investors and then added to our database all the rounds that we missed.
• Investors frequently contact us to let us know about raises they've participated in or send us lists of all their raises to add them to our DB. The main reason for this is that our DB is used to maintain a list of "active investors" that is frequently used by founders when raising, so usually investors/funds are interested in having all their raises represented to be on that list.
• We've also searched for specific things, such as ICOs, when needed to fill gaps in our data.

Data quality

Because of how we've manually verified every raise I'm very confident that all raises in our database are correct, however because of our methodology there's some holes in our data that you should be aware of as they bias it in certain ways:

• In some cases raise announcements will neglect to include small angel investors that participated in the round, mainly because they have a bunch of small angel investors and they think it could crowd the announcement. Since we mainly rely in announcements to populate our DB this means that these missing small angel investors won't be included in our data unless we end up including these angel investors through other ways (such as looking at their portfolio of investments). This introduces a systematic bias on our data we're small angel investors are underrepresented.
• Missing raises: An issue we've found is that a lot of details from ICOs from the 2017 cycle are completely gone from the internet, either because a lot of these companies failed and then took website and blog down or because team has deliberately tried to hide information about it because it was scam-ish. The result is that while we've been able to add information for the biggest ICOs, such as EOS (4.2bn) or Telegram/TON (1.7bn), there's lots of small ICOs that we've missed and are not included in our database because information on them is gone due to link rot. This biases our data in that small ICOs are underrepresented and the number of raises from 2017 is lower than the real one. However, because ICOs had a very top heavy distribution (the biggest ICOs raised insane amounts like 4.2bn and 1.7bn) I believe the sum of raised money during the ICO cycle is roughly correct.

A note on dates

The date we use for each raise in our DB is the date when the raise was announced, which can be different from the date in which the raise is completed.

For starters raising isnt a single-day event but rather usually a months-long process that involves pitching to a lot of investors, drafting the legal contracts and then getting the money from all investors into the company's bank account. This means that likely the decisions from VCs to invest happened before the raise is closed but the length of the raise and the time when decisions were made are never made public, so we don't have access to that information.

Furthermore, there are companies that choose not to announce the raise when it's closed but instead to wait some time before announcing. I've had many conversations with investors about this and the main reason why companies choose to delay announcements is because their product is not ready yet and since a raise announcement leads to an inflow of potential users they want to make sure they can convert these into users, so they wait till they have something that can do that. Generally, this delay can last up to 1 year but is not distributed evenly over time, most startups announce it around the closing date, while very few announce it as late as 1 year later, thus most announcements are concentrated around actual closing date. When raises are announced the closing date is never disclosed so there's no way for us to know about it.

This introduces another systematic bias into our data, because some dates will be offset, so this is important to take into account when looking at the data.

FAQ

What type of raises do you include?

We include anything that looks like a raise and leads to a sale of tokens, equity or warrants for tokens. This means that our data includes ICOs, public sales, standard VC raises and seed raises from angel investors.

We don't include NFT sales, OTC sales nor marketmaking agreements.

Why is valuation info missing from most raises?

The vast majority of team don't announce the valuation at which they raised that and instead they treat it like a secret, so it's impossible to get this data from public sources. When valuation is announced we provide that information.