Funding Signal Finder from Public Web

Discover recent company funding signals from the public web — press releases, news pages, RSS/Atom feeds, and official public filings (incl. optional SEC EDGAR Form D). For every signal you get one flat, CSV-ready row: company, signal type, funding stage, amount, investors, source URL, published date, and a transparent confidence score (0–100) with reason tags.

Built for B2B sales, lead generation, agencies, recruiters, market researchers, and startup/VC analysts who want actionable funding triggers without a fragile, expensive paid startup database.

• ✅ No login, no cookies, no API keys. Public data only.
• ✅ One row per unique funding signal, deduplicated and source-linked.
• ✅ Transparent, non-AI scoring you can audit field-by-field.
• ✅ No paid data dependency — not a Crunchbase/PitchBook/Dealroom replacement; it reads the open web and official free filings.

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What it does

1. Discovers candidate sources for your inputs in one of three modes (search results, supplied pages/feeds, or per-company funding queries + optional SEC Form D).
2. Extracts metadata from each source — title, canonical URL, source domain/type, published date, and a short snippet — preferring RSS fields, then JSON-LD NewsArticle/Article, then Open Graph, then visible text.
3. Classifies the funding signal with transparent keyword rules and extracts funding stage, amount, currency, and investors.
4. Scores a 0–100 confidence_score, deduplicates, applies your filters, and emits one flat row per unique signal.

It does not use Crunchbase/PitchBook/LinkedIn or any login/paywall source, deep-crawl whole domains, download media, or use AI summarization.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	keyword_search	keyword_search, company_list, or source_urls.
queries	array of strings	[]	Funding search keywords (for keyword_search). Funding intent added automatically. Max 50.
companies	array of strings	[]	Company names/domains (for company_list). Max 500.
sourceUrls	array of strings	[]	Public pages or RSS/Atom feeds (for source_urls). Invalid URLs counted as failed. Max 500.
maxResults	integer	100	Max unique saved rows (1–5000).
dateFrom	string	""	Lower bound for detected date (ISO YYYY-MM-DD).
dateTo	string	""	Upper bound for detected date (ISO YYYY-MM-DD).
signalTypes	array of strings	[]	Keep only these signal types (empty = all).
includeKeywords	array of strings	[]	Keep rows matching at least one term (max 100).
excludeKeywords	array of strings	[]	Remove rows matching any term (max 100).
minConfidence	string	medium	low, medium, or high.
includeSecFormD	boolean	true	In company_list, also search the public SEC EDGAR Form D feed per company.
deduplicate	boolean	true	One row per unique funding signal.
proxyConfiguration	object	{ "useApifyProxy": true }	Datacenter, no proxy, or custom proxy URLs. Apify Residential rejected at startup.

Signal types: funding_round, grant, investment, sec_form_d, acquisition_financing, partnership_funding, unknown_funding.

Example inputs

1. Keyword search for recent funding news

{
    "mode": "keyword_search",
    "queries": ["fintech startup raises seed funding", "AI company series A funding"],
    "maxResults": 100,
    "minConfidence": "medium",
    "deduplicate": true,
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

2. Track specific companies (with SEC Form D)

{
    "mode": "company_list",
    "companies": ["Canva", "atlassian.com", "SafetyCulture"],
    "maxResults": 100,
    "dateFrom": "2026-01-01",
    "signalTypes": ["funding_round", "grant", "sec_form_d"],
    "minConfidence": "medium",
    "includeSecFormD": true,
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

3. Scan your own funding RSS feeds

{
    "mode": "source_urls",
    "sourceUrls": ["https://techcrunch.com/category/fundraising/feed/"],
    "maxResults": 50,
    "minConfidence": "low"
}

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Output

One flat row per unique funding signal. Key fields:

• Input/company: input_value, input_mode, company_name, company_domain
• Signal: signal_type, signal_label, funding_stage, amount_text, currency, investors_text, matched_keywords
• Source: announcement_title, announcement_url, source_domain, source_type, snippet
• Dates: published_date, detected_date, is_recent
• Scoring: confidence_score (0–100), confidence_label (low/medium/high), reason_tags
• IDs/runtime: record_id, scraped_at

All output fields (table view)

Sample record

Real output row (from a source_urls run over a public funding RSS feed). company_domain is null here because feed items are read feed-only for speed — it populates in keyword_search / company_list runs, which fetch the article page.

{
    "input_value": "https://techcrunch.com/category/fundraising/feed/",
    "input_mode": "source_urls",
    "company_name": "Jedify",
    "company_domain": null,
    "signal_type": "funding_round",
    "signal_label": "Funding round",
    "funding_stage": null,
    "amount_text": "$24M",
    "currency": "USD",
    "investors_text": "Norwest, with participation from S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, and Oceans Ventures",
    "announcement_title": "Jedify raises $24M to help companies arm AI agents with context on their business",
    "announcement_url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/10/jedify-raises-24m-to-help-companies-arm-ai-agents-with-context-on-their-business/",
    "source_domain": "techcrunch.com",
    "source_type": "rss_item",
    "published_date": "2026-06-10",
    "detected_date": "2026-06-18",
    "snippet": "Jedify raises $24M to help companies arm AI agents with context on their business. The funding round was led by Norwest, with participation from S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, and Oceans Ventures. Snowflake Ventures also participated as a strategic investor.",
    "matched_keywords": "raises, funding round, funding, venture, led by, capital",
    "confidence_score": 85,
    "confidence_label": "high",
    "reason_tags": "title_contains_raises,amount_detected,credible_source_type,investor_phrase_detected,company_match_confirmed",
    "is_recent": true,
    "record_id": "funding_5eb064c040fb",
    "scraped_at": "2026-06-18T13:20:53.560Z"
}

A run summary is stored in the default key-value store under RUN_SUMMARY with counters such as inputs_total, candidate_urls_found, raw_results_found, results_saved, duplicates_removed, filtered_out, charged_events, and sec_form_d_results.

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Confidence score

A transparent 0–100 weighted sum (PRD §7), from visible public signals only:

• +30 strong funding verb in the headline (raises, secures, closes, lands, receives…)
• +20 amount detected · +15 funding stage detected · +15 credible source type
• +10 investor phrase detected · +10 company match confirmed
• −20 weak keyword-only match · −20 no date and not a directly supplied page

Labels: 75–100 high, 45–74 medium, 0–44 low.

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Pricing

Pay Per Event. One event, funding-signal-result, is charged only after a valid, unique funding-signal row is successfully pushed to the dataset. Duplicate signals, filtered-out rows, and failed inputs are never charged. The actor honours your per-run spending limit and stops cleanly when it is reached.

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🚦 Proxy policy

Use Apify Datacenter proxy or no proxy for normal runs — both work reliably for public news/press/RSS pages and SEC EDGAR feeds at this actor's conservative concurrency.

Apify Residential proxy is not supported. The actor fails at startup if apifyProxyGroups includes RESIDENTIAL. Reason: in pay-per-event actors, residential bandwidth (~$8/GB) is billed to the developer, not the run user, so a single bandwidth-heavy run could exceed the per-result event revenue.

If you genuinely need residential routing, supply your own residential provider via the proxy editor's Custom proxy URLs field — that traffic goes through your provider, not Apify, and is unaffected:

http://user:pass@proxy.iproyal.com:12321
http://user:pass@proxy.brightdata.com:22225
http://user:pass@proxy.oxylabs.io:7777

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Notes & limitations

• Coverage depends on what is publicly visible: the actor reads search results, supplied pages/feeds, and official free filings — it does not access paid databases or login-gated sources.
• Amounts, stages, and investors are extracted with conservative rules and left null when not clearly present — nothing is invented.
• company_domain is resolved from the article's links. In keyword search and company list the article page is fetched anyway, so it's populated at no extra cost (and stays null when an article doesn't link to the company's site). In Source URLs / RSS mode, feed items are read from the feed only for speed, so company_domain is null there.
• SEC EDGAR Form D discovery is best-effort and US-focused; failures never break the main news/RSS flow.
• This actor is HTTP-only by design (no headless browser), so JavaScript-only pages with no metadata may yield a lower-confidence row.