UK Startup Funding Tracker — Companies House SH01 API

Every UK funding round, from the legal filing — before the press release. When a UK company issues shares, it must file an SH01 (return of allotment of shares) at Companies House, by law, within one month. That puts UK equity raises on the public record before most of them are ever announced. This actor polls the free Companies House REST API for SH01 / capital-category filings and returns one normalized detection record per allotment.

This is public-record detection — not investment advice, and not a trading signal.

Weekly: who raised in the UK this week

Point it at the last 7 days and get a clean list of UK companies that just filed a share allotment — company, filing date, allotment date, post-allotment capital, registered office, SIC, and current officers. Run it on a schedule for a standing "UK rounds this week" feed.

Who uses this

• VCs sourcing UK deal flow the week it's filed, not the month it's announced.
• Sales / BD teams targeting newly-funded UK startups.
• Recruiters tracking companies about to hire.
• UK service providers (legal, accounting, banking) — the Beauhurst buyer, at a fraction of the price.

Works out of the box — hybrid key model

Runs immediately with a built-in Companies House key: the one-click run and both example tasks work with zero setup. Built-in-key runs are capped at 200 records/run to protect the shared key.

For high-volume or scheduled monitoring, bring your own free Companies House key — paste it into the companyHouseApiKey input and the cap is removed. Getting one takes about 2 minutes:

1. Go to developer.company-information.service.gov.uk and sign in / register.
2. Create an application (REST, Live environment).
3. Generate a REST API key and paste it into companyHouseApiKey.

What you get — one record per allotment

Field	Example
company_name	UNREAL SOLUTIONS LTD
company_number	14451923
filing_date	2025-10-01
allotment_date	2025-09-17
capital_after	200 (nominal statement of capital, GBP)
capital_delta	null (derived only when a prior capital figure is available)
share_class	null (in the filing PDF — v2)
registered_address	..., London, EC2A ...
sic_codes	["62012"]
officers_snapshot	[{"name":"...","role":"director"}]
filing_link	https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14451923/filing-history/...

Pricing

Pay-per-event: £/$0.035 per UK funding round record at the founding rate — about $1 ≈ 28 records. You pay only for allotments returned; a run that matches nothing costs effectively nothing.

Inputs

daysBack / dateFrom / dateTo (SH01 filing window) · sicCodes (universe filter) · region · incorporatedFrom (startup universe bound) · minCapitalChange · maxCompanies · companyHouseApiKey (optional override).

Two ready-to-run examples

1. This week's UK rounds (tech universe, last 7 days)

{ "daysBack": 7, "sicCodes": ["62012","62020","62090","63110","58290","72190"], "maxCompanies": 300 }

2. London tech raises over £1M capital change

{ "region": "london", "sicCodes": ["62012","62020","62090","63110"], "daysBack": 30, "minCapitalChange": 1000000 }

Use with AI agents

The record schema is agent-friendly. Point an LLM agent at the dataset and ask:

• "List London companies that filed an SH01 in the last 7 days with a director appointed this year, and draft a one-line intro for each."
• "Group this week's allotments by SIC and flag any company that also appears in my CRM."
• "Which of these registered offices are in Cambridge or Oxford?"

Callable over the Apify API/MCP, so it drops straight into agent tool-chains.

The NexGenData funding-intelligence cluster — four money-in signals, one shelf

• Startup Funding Tracker — US equity rounds (SEC Form D, TechCrunch, YC).
• SEC New VC Fund Tracker — new US venture fund formations.
• US Grant Awards Tracker — non-dilutive US government money (SBIR/STTR, NIH, NSF).
• UK Startup Funding Tracker (this actor) — UK equity rounds from Companies House SH01 filings.

Working UK company data more broadly? Pair with France Companies Search for EU coverage and UK Find a Tender for UK public-sector contract awards.

Honest limits

• SH01 filing lag. Companies have up to one month to file an SH01 after the allotment, and some file late. allotment_date is the true event date; filing_date is when it hit the register. This tracks filed allotments.
• Not every allotment is a fundraise. SH01 is also filed for share option exercises, bonus / capitalisation issues, and intra-group reorganisations. Use minCapitalChange, sicCodes, and incorporatedFrom to bias toward genuine venture rounds, and treat each record as a lead to verify, not a confirmed raise.
• Nominal capital ≠ amount raised. capital_after is the nominal statement of capital (often £1–£1,000). The actual money raised (share premium) lives in the filing PDF — parsing that is v2. shares_allotted and share_class are likewise in the PDF and returned as null in v1.
• Bounded universe (v1 = polling). v1 scans a bounded company universe (by SIC, region, incorporation date) rather than the entire register. The full real-time firehose across all UK companies is the Companies House streaming feed — planned for v2. Widen sicCodes / maxCompanies / incorporatedFrom to broaden coverage.

Data: Companies House, under the Open Government Licence v3.0.