Built a free API that turns SEC Form D filings into a scored lead feed
Every company that raises private capital in the US has to file a Form D with the SEC within 15 days. It's public record, but the raw EDGAR data is messy — no scoring, no enrichment, funds/SPVs/amendments mixed in as noise with real operating companies.
I built Funding Signals to fix that: it watches the EDGAR feed plus funding-news RSS, scores each raise 0-100 (size, industry fit, contact reachability), and enriches it with company domain + contact info. The idea is simple — a company that just raised has budget and no vendor picked yet, so timing the outreach to the filing date beats cold-calling a random list.
Free tier gives delayed signals with no enrichment (good for exploring). Paid tiers add same-day signals + enrichment. There's also a public /v1/sample endpoint, no auth, if you just want to see the data shape before committing to anything.
Built solo — FastAPI backend, deployed on Render, DNS/analytics through Cloudflare. Happy to go into the scoring model or the Form D parsing edge cases if useful to anyone building something similar.
SEC Form D filings are such an underrated data source - everyone focuses on Crunchbase or LinkedIn but these regulatory docs have been public forever and nobody's really tapped them. How are you handling the scoring - is it based on raise amount, investor track record, or something else?
The timing advantage is the interesting part — turning a public filing into an actionable sales signal.
What would convince you that the filing event itself is the strongest buying trigger, rather than one signal among many that sales teams already monitor?
The Form D parse is the fun part, but the enrichment tier is where the real risk lives, and it's worth designing for now rather than later. Appending a named person's contact details so someone can cold-outreach them is processing personal data, and the moment any of those contacts sit in the EU your paid customers inherit GDPR: the outreach needs a lawful basis, and because you sourced the contact from somewhere other than the person, there's an Art 14 "where we got your data" notice obligation on top. US-only filings doesn't mean US-only people; plenty of Form D filers have EU-resident founders or execs. Two things that'd make me trust the enrichment: flag which contacts are EU-resident so a buyer can route them differently, and split "contact confidence" into role-based addresses (info@, generic) versus a named individual, because the deliverability and the legal profile are nothing alike. A wrong named contact is worse than none; it burns the sender's domain. None of this kills the product, it just decides whether the paid tier is sellable to anyone doing outreach across a border.
The timing angle is strong, but “just raised” does not automatically mean “ready to buy.” A lot depends on what the capital is for, how mature the company is, and whether the target role is actually reachable.
The part I’d want to trust most is the scoring. I’d show exactly why a lead received an 82 instead of a 54, and separate signals like raise size, company type, hiring activity, industry fit, and contact confidence. Otherwise the score risks becoming another opaque number.
The best validation would be outcome-based: compare outreach using Funding Signals against a normal prospect list and measure reply rate, meetings booked, and revenue—not just opens or clicks. Have you tested whether higher-scored filings actually convert better yet?
curious how you handle amendments. a Form D amendment can bump the raise size or swap related persons weeks after the original filing, so does that trigger a re-score that overwrites the first signal, or do you keep both? if someone already reached out off the original score, silently changing it loses the "why we contacted them" trail.