Investment & Funding Data

The Data City tracks investment activity for UK companies — investment rounds, IPOs and acquisitions — sourced from a specialist third-party data provider (currently Specter) and matched to Companies House. We have combined this data with our own to build a more complete view of each sector. Our RTICs provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the economy, going beyond the limitations of traditional systems such as SIC codes. RTICs combined with investor data creates a rich dataset which can be used for economic analysis. We’ve developed a paid, yet fully reproducible and downloadable economic analysis platform which stems from Companies House. We incorporate investment data for further analysis. Our unique platform stands out by offering company-level data access, setting it apart from the IDBR and ONS datasets, which are not publicly accessible.

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Method for matching

Specter’s data does not include Companies House numbers, so The Data City matches each company to Companies House using our own matching. Matching runs daily, so new companies and changed records are re-matched as they arrive. Acquisition events are matched to the specific registered entity involved in the deal, while investment rounds and IPOs roll up to the group parent company.

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Data

We extract specific fields from our investment data which are most useful for analysis. These fields are based on per-round investment information — one row per investment round, IPO, or acquisition. The data is updated daily and we take this on a timeseries basis. This information is available within the growth tab on the per company page view.

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Temporal coverage

Investment data is a rolling, continuously updated dataset rather than a fixed window. Coverage is comprehensive from roughly the mid-2010s onward and is densest across the last decade, with round activity peaking around 2020–2023. There is a thinner tail of earlier deals going back to the 2000s, but pre-2010 coverage is best treated as indicative rather than complete. Keep three things in mind when reading the figures:

• Recency lag: the most recent weeks and months undercount, because funding rounds take time to be announced and then ingested. Recent counts rise as later refreshes land, so don’t read the latest period as final.
• Historical thinning: pre-2010 activity is sparse and shouldn’t be presented as exhaustive coverage.
• Quote an “as of” date: because the dataset is live, any figure should be quoted against the refresh it came from rather than as a fixed number.

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Investment round types

Each investment round carries one of the following types. “Counts towards total funding” shows whether rounds of that type are included in a company’s total funding figure. Grants appear as rounds but do not count towards total funding. Grant funding on the platform is carried by our dedicated Innovate UK and 360Giving datasets, so counting it here as well would count it twice. Grants funded solely by Innovate UK or UK Research and Innovation are left out of the investment data entirely for the same reason. Total funding is filterable within the filters bar, and the latest investment round is a company’s most recent round. Where the provider identifies who led a round, we also carry the lead investor name(s) alongside the full investor list. Around 6 in 10 rounds with investors have a named lead, and a round can have several co-leads. Beyond investment rounds, we also track exit and M&A events as their own rows. These never count towards total funding. Acquisitions, mergers and buyouts appear from both sides of each deal: once for the company that was bought (its exit) and once for the company that made the acquisition, marked with “(MADE)”. Each company also carries three flags derived from these events: whether it has made an acquisition, has been acquired, or has listed via an IPO. These power the corresponding filters on the platform. On analyse and explore you have the ability to filter for companies that have raised certain rounds of investment funding.

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Total funding metrics

The provider supplies two company-level totals:

• Total funding raised — pre-exit venture investment. This excludes grants, debt, acquisitions, and post-IPO equity, and is the total the platform reports and filters on.
• Total capital raised — lifetime external capital, i.e. the same set of rounds plus equity raised on the public market after an IPO. This exists in the source data but is not currently shown on the platform.

These totals are calculated across the provider’s whole tracking period, not for one particular year.

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Currency

Funding amounts are converted to GBP at the time of the round.

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Unannounced investment

Some investment rounds are never publicly announced at the time they happen. Specter has identified coverage of unannounced investment rounds as a strategic product priority and is actively investing in data acquisition and tooling improvements to expand portfolio coverage and capture previously undisclosed financings. Enhancements in this area are currently on the roadmap, with further updates expected from late Q3 through Q4.