How we build the funding map

Capital Atlas tracks equity venture rounds: priced and convertible financings where founders sell ownership to raise capital. That spans pre-seed and seed through the late and growth stages, including large private rounds led by venture and crossover investors.

We exclude flows that are not equity venture funding, because mixing them in would distort the picture. That means no venture debt, no grants, no project finance, no public-market raises, no buyouts, and no secondary share sales. The goal is one consistent definition applied the same way in every hub.

A hub is a metropolitan area, not a country. We attribute each round to the metro where the lead-raising company is headquartered, so a Series B for a company based in Austin counts toward Austin rather than being absorbed into a national total.

Headquarters is the anchor because it is the most stable, comparable signal of where an ecosystem actually forms talent, capital, and companies. A company with a satellite office elsewhere still counts in the metro it calls home.

Every venture data publisher captures a slightly different slice of the market, with different lags, thresholds, and disclosure coverage. Rather than pick one source, we normalize across several to show relative scale and direction. The result is an estimate designed for comparison between hubs and across time, not an exact accounting figure.

Because we track a defined set of hubs rather than every company on Earth, the global figure is a lower bound on true worldwide venture funding. Rounds in cities we do not yet cover, and undisclosed financings, are not included. Read the totals as floors, and read the relative shape, which hubs are rising or cooling, as the signal.

The dataset follows the venture reporting calendar. Annual figures firm up over the months after a year closes as late-reported and previously undisclosed rounds surface, and we revise prior periods when better data lands. Treat the most recent year as provisional and earlier years as increasingly settled.

A few things to keep in mind when reading the map. Sector and stage mixes are modeled shares of a hub's total, so they describe composition rather than audited line items. Currency is reported in US dollars. Very large single rounds can swing a smaller hub's annual figure, which is real signal, not noise, but worth noticing. And absence of coverage is not absence of activity: a quiet hub on the map may simply be one we have not added yet.