detect-funding-round

name	detect-funding-round
description	Parses a capital-raise announcement into a structured FundingEvent record — company, round stage, amount and currency, dates, lead and participating investors, valuation, use of proceeds, confidence. Use when a news item, press release or search result reports financing: "raised $47 million", "closed its Series B", "seed round", "post-money valuation of $400M", "led by Northgate Ventures". Not for change-of-control news — an acquisition or merger routes to `detect-ma-event`, a product launch to `analyze-release-notes`.
license	MIT
metadata	{"category":"domain","method":"Funding-round event extraction (Form D / venture round taxonomy)","origin":"U.S. SEC Regulation D Form D, 1982; staged-financing taxonomy, Gompers & Lerner","version":"2.0.0"}

Detect Funding Round

A funding announcement is prose; the record it should become is short and easy to corrupt — a range averaged the wrong way, a valuation filed as the amount raised, a bare $ from a Toronto newsroom read as USD. This skill turns capital-raise news into a FundingEvent built on the facts the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Form D (Regulation D, in force since 1982) requires of the primary filing: who raised, how much, in what currency, from whom, when. It never fills a field the source did not state: the failure mode is a tidy record that misstates the number.

When to invoke

Invoke when the text contains:

• Series [A-Z] or Series [A-Z]-\d ("Series B-2"), seed round, pre-seed, bridge round, crossover round
• raised $[\d.]+ ?[MmBbKk], raised [\d.]+ (million|billion), closed (a|its) … (round|financing)
• post-money valuation (of|at) $, or led by <investor> beside an amount

Do NOT invoke when:

• The story is a change of control — acquisition, merger, take-private. Route to detect-ma-event: a buyout counted as a round wrecks comparables.
• It is a product, model or version announcement. Route to analyze-release-notes.
• The mention is incidental ("the Y Combinator-backed startup") with no round announced — no event to record.
• The amount or investors cannot be corroborated from a second source — use triangulate-sources first.

Procedure

1 — Normalise the amount

$47M → 47000000; £500k → 500000; INR 400 crore → 4000000000 (1 crore = 10^7). A range — $47M-$50M, $47M to $50M — becomes its midpoint 48500000 and costs confidence; "up to $50M" is a ceiling, not the amount raised. Never convert currency: keep the figure as stated and name the currency beside it. A bare $ is ambiguous — USD, CAD, AUD, SGD and HKD all write it — so commit to USD only on US$/USD.

2 — Identify the stage

Map to the canonical vocabulary and nothing else: "Series A round" → Series A, "Series B-2 financing" → Series B-2, "seed financing" → Seed, "pre-seed" → Pre-seed, "bridge"/"extension" → Bridge, "tender offer" → Secondary, "growth equity"/"late-stage"/"crossover" → Growth, and an IPO, direct listing or SPAC merger → Public (IPO), Public (Direct), Public (SPAC). If the text says only "its latest round", leave stage blank. Venture debt and grants are not equity stages.

3 — Keep the valuation out of the amount

"$3.5B at a $61.5B post-money valuation" is two numbers in two fields. Read the qualifier: "post-money" → post_money_valuation_usd, "pre-money" → pre_money_valuation_usd. A bare "valued at $X" defaults to post-money by convention, but note the ambiguity: the two differ by exactly the size of the round.

4 — Identify the investors

The lead is the investor the text says led, co-led or priced the round. Everyone else named — after "with participation from", "joined by", "alongside" — is a participant. Split lists on commas and "and", stripping qualifiers such as "existing investors". No lead named means lead_investors stays empty: being named first is not evidence of leading.

5 — Date the round

The announcement date is normally the article's publication date. The close date is a different fact, often stated in the body ("which closed on 18 February 2025"); record both in ISO YYYY-MM-DD form when both appear. A single unmarked date is the announcement date.

6 — Grade the source

Grade the source with rate-source-admiralty. An SEC Form D filing, a press release on the company's own domain, or Reuters/FT/Bloomberg copy sits at A1–B2; an aggregator with no primary citation is C2–D3; a rumour blog is F6. A confident parse of a bad source is still a bad record, so the grade travels beside it.

7 — Score the confidence and emit the record

Confidence is 0–100: base 60; +15 an explicit stage; +10 an explicit lead; +10 an exact single amount; −15 a range or "up to" cap; −10 an ambiguous currency; clamp to 0–100. A record scoring ≥ 75 from a source graded B3 or better ships as it stands. Below either bar, attach the failing reason and hand it to a human reviewer — abstain-or-escalate covers that decision.

Output template

{
  "event_type": "funding_round",
  "company_name": "Helion Diagnostics",
  "stage": "Series B",
  "amount_usd": 47000000,
  "amount_currency": "USD?",
  "announced_date": "2025-03-03",
  "close_date": "2025-02-18",
  "post_money_valuation_usd": 400000000,
  "lead_investors": ["Northgate Ventures"],
  "participating_investors": ["Baseline Capital", "Kestrel Partners"],
  "use_of_proceeds": "expand its clinical trial programme",
  "source_url": "https://example.com/pr/helion-series-b",
  "source_grade" 
   

event_type, company_name and source_url are mandatory; a pre-money figure goes in pre_money_valuation_usd. Every other field is optional and must be omitted — not nulled, not guessed — when unstated. amount_currency keeps a trailing ? (USD?) while the currency is unresolved; amount_usd holds the figure in the currency named beside it, with no exchange rate applied.

Worked example

Illustrative article text (company and funds invented):

Helion Diagnostics, a Cambridge-based cancer-screening company, raised $47 million in Series B funding, the company announced on 2025-03-03. The round was led by Northgate Ventures, with participation from Baseline Capital, Kestrel Partners and Orion Growth Fund. The financing, which closed on 2025-02-18, values Helion at $400 million post-money. Helion will use the funds to expand its clinical trial programme and open a manufacturing site in Basel.

python3 scripts/funding.py extract --demo --source-grade B2 prints the record (wrapped) and trace:

{
  "event_type": "funding_round", "company_name": "Helion Diagnostics",
  "stage": "Series B", "amount_usd": 47000000, "amount_currency": "USD?",
  "announced_date": "2025-03-03", "close_date": "2025-02-18",
  "post_money_valuation_usd": 400000000,
  "lead_investors": ["Northgate Ventures"],
  "participating_investors": ["Baseline Capital", "Kestrel Partners", "Orion Growth Fund"],
  "use_of_proceeds": "expand its clinical trial programme and open a manufacturing site in Basel",
  "source_grade":   

confidence trace (SKILL.md scoring rules):
  base                           +60   starting point for a single-source parse
  + explicit stage               +15   Series B
  + explicit lead investor       +10   Northgate Ventures
  + exact single amount          +10   47,000,000 USD?
  - ambiguous currency           -10   USD?
  = confidence                    85   the SKILL.md review threshold is 75

Three readings carry the example. The $400 million is a valuation, so it never touches amount_usd. The $ is unmarked, so the currency stays USD? and the score loses 10 rather than deciding the question. source_url is absent, so the field is omitted and the notes flag it must be supplied. At 85 with a B2 source, the record clears both bars.

Verification

• Amount and valuation are different numbers in different fields; no valuation reached amount_usd.
• Each currency is the one the source used, no exchange rate applied, and any bare $ is either resolved by explicit context or still carries ?.
• lead_investors holds only investors the text says led, co-led or priced the round — empty rather than guessed.
• A range was recorded as its midpoint and an "up to" figure as a cap, penalty applied — recompute with python3 scripts/funding.py amount "<string>".
• The stage is a canonical label or blank; none was inferred from the round size.
• Every populated field traces to a sentence in the source, every unstated field is absent, and the confidence arithmetic reproduces.

Companion tool

scripts/funding.py (Python 3.9+, stdlib only, offline) applies steps 1–3 and 7:

python3 scripts/funding.py amount "$47M to $50M"
python3 scripts/funding.py stage "its Series B-2 financing"
python3 scripts/funding.py extract --file article.txt --source-grade B2
python3 scripts/funding.py --demo | --selftest   # worked example | 83 checks

$ python3 scripts/funding.py amount "$47M to $50M"
value:              48,500,000
currency:           USD?
confidence_penalty: -25
note:               '$' is ambiguous (USD/CAD/AUD/SGD/HKD/NZD); no US$/USD marker in the text
note:               range 47,000,000 to 50,000,000 -> midpoint (SKILL.md step 1)

extract prints the record on stdout, the confidence trace on stderr. The skill works without it — reading the article is the analyst's job either way; the tool only removes arithmetic and normalisation slips (midpoints, crore, caps, ambiguous $), and never invents a field.

Pair with adjacent skills

• detect-ma-event — the change-of-control sibling; run one or the other, never both, or the money is counted twice.
• analyze-release-notes — sibling parser for product announcements.
• rate-source-admiralty — supplies the source_grade step 6 requires.
• triangulate-sources — corroborates amount and investors before a consequential record ships.
• abstain-or-escalate — the decision procedure for records below the confidence or source bar.
• Methodology counterpart: methodologies/foresight/horizon-scanning.md — funding events are one signal type a scan collects.

Anti-patterns

• Do not merge amount and valuation. "$3.5B raised" and "$61.5B post-money" are two facts; conflating them inflates a round by an order of magnitude.
• Do not guess the stage. Seed and Series A are different rounds; a wrong one propagates into every comparable built on the record.
• Do not convert currency silently. $47M in a Canadian report may be CAD, and an unmarked conversion is unrecoverable.
• Do not promote the first-named investor to lead, or present a midpoint as exact; the penalty exists so the reader knows the number was reconstructed.

Reference

• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Form D — Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities, Regulation D (17 CFR §§230.501–508), adopted 1982. https://www.sec.gov/forms — primary record for US private rounds.
• P. A. Gompers and J. Lerner, The Venture Capital Cycle, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-262-07255-7 — staged financing as an economic mechanism; why the stage label carries weight.
• W. A. Sahlman, "The structure and governance of venture-capital organizations," Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 473–521, 1990 — why the lead investor and post-money valuation are worth extracting.
• Crunchbase and PitchBook round taxonomies, accessed 2025 — cross-checks on stage and amount, never primary.