🦄 Venture Capital & Startup News Intelligence

Turn noisy tech news into structured Deal Flow data.

This Actor monitors top Venture Capital & Startup news sources (TechCrunch, Sifted, VentureBeat, etc.) and uses AI to extract structured intelligence.

🚀 Key Features

• Batteries Included: No API keys required for you. We handle the OpenAI and Search infrastructure.
• Smart Extraction Engine: Uses a hybrid "Scrape-First, Search-Fallback" engine. If a site (like VentureBeat) blocks the scraper, the Actor automatically switches to Brave Search API to recover the data.
• Deal Data: Automatically parses Raise Amount (e.g., "$15M"), Round Stage (Series A), and Lead Investors.
• Market Intelligence: Classifies startups by Industry Vertical (e.g., Generative AI, Fintech) and Sentiment.
• Real-Time Alerts: Optional Discord integration to ping your team the moment a new deal is announced.

🛠️ How It Works

1. Select Source: Choose a specific outlet (e.g., TechCrunch, Finsmes) or All for maximum coverage.
2. Set Limits: Define how many new articles to process (default: 10).
3. Start: The Actor handles the scraping, fallback, and AI analysis automatically.

📥 Output Data

Every run produces a structured JSON dataset. Even if no funding deal is found, you get a high-quality AI summary of the tech news.

{
  "title": "Startup X Raises $15M Series A",
  "url": "[https://techcrunch.com/](https://techcrunch.com/)...",
  "content_type": "Funding News",
  "deal_size": "$15,000,000",
  "round_stage": "Series A",
  "investors": ["Sequoia Capital", "Benchmark"],
  "industry_vertical": "Fintech",
  "sentiment": "Positive",
  "summary": "Startup X, a payment processor for...",
  "source": "TechCrunch"
}

💰 Pricing & Costs

This Actor uses a transparent Pay-Per-Analysis model.

• Apify Compute: Standard platform usage fees (seconds of run time).
• Analysis Fee: We charge a small fee (event: article-summary) for every article analyzed by our AI.
  • Why? We incur costs for premium proxies, Brave Search API fallbacks, and LLM tokens to ensure you get the highest quality data, even from difficult-to-scrape websites.

🔔 Discord Alerts

Want real-time deal flow in your Slack/Discord?

1. Create a Webhook in your Discord Channel settings.
2. Paste the URL into the Discord Webhook input field.
3. Schedule this Actor to run every hour.

❓ FAQ

Q: Do I need an OpenAI API Key? A: No. The Actor uses our internal infrastructure. You just pay per result.

Q: Why do some articles show "Free Record"? A: If an article is skipped due to deduplication or errors before reaching the AI, you are not charged the analysis fee.

Q: Which sources work best for Deals? A: Finsmes, PE Hub, and StrictlyVC provide the highest density of structured deal data. TechCrunch is excellent but includes general tech news which we also analyze.

### Summary of Changes:
1.  **Billing:** Changed from "Pay-Per-Result" to **"Pay-Per-Analysis"** to reflect that you charge for `article-summary` on every AI run.
2.  **Technology:** Added the **"Smart Extraction Engine"** section to highlight the value of your Brave Search Fallback (justifying the cost to the user).
3.  **Simplification:** Removed mentions of the "Proxy" and clarified that "Batteries are Included" (Developer pays costs, User pays Developer).