The Most Underrated Dataset in Venture Capital
When a fund closes, most of the deal is private. LPs sign NDAs. The firm issues a brief announcement if they feel like it. But one thing is public: the SEC Form D.
Under Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933, any fund that raises capital from accredited investors must file Form D within 15 days of the first sale of securities. That means every VC fund, from a $500K solo GP to a $10B flagship, leaves a public trail.
What's in a Form D Filing
Each filing contains:
- Entity name — the fund's legal name (e.g., "Sequoia Capital Fund XVII, L.P.")
- Issuer name — the related management company
- Date of first sale — when they started raising
- Total amount sold — what they actually closed
- Total offering amount — what they were targeting
- City and state — the registrant's address
What's not in a Form D: LP names, investment strategy, fees, or fund terms.
Why This Matters
Aggregating 15+ years of Form D data gives you a view of VC market activity that no private database can fully replicate. You can track:
- Which firms are raising right now
- Whether fund sizes are growing or shrinking
- Geographic concentration of capital
- Emergence of new managers (never-before-filed entities)
The Limitations
Form D data has real gaps. Amendments can replace original filings, creating noise. Some firms use multiple entity names across funds, making consolidation tricky. And the "total amount sold" field is self-reported — there's no SEC verification.
That's why NextRounds builds consolidation logic on top of the raw filings: matching fund entities to firm names, deduplicating amendments, and flagging rolling fund structures (like those on AngelList).
How We Process the Data
Every quarter, the SEC releases bulk TSV files covering all Form D filings from that period. NextRounds ingests these files, runs them through a cleaning pipeline that normalizes firm names, and surfaces the result in the tables you see here.
The pipeline has processed over 69 quarters of data — going back to late 2008 — covering thousands of VC firms and funds.