VentureSource venture-capital data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

VentureSource is a paid licensed product (Dow Jones / CB Insights), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session. Treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

VentureSource is a venture-capital deals and fund database: VC fund characteristics (size, vintage, location), startup financing rounds (amount, date, investors), pre-money valuations, and the startup’s headquarters location over time. It is one of the two standard VC sources (alongside PitchBook and the older Thomson VentureXpert) for financing-round and fund-flow research. A paper we distill uses it: Chen & Ewens use VentureSource as their primary VC source (2010 to 2018) for fund characteristics, startup financing rounds, and the startup’s HQ state over time when showing that local VC supply drives startup agglomeration in VC hubs, with PitchBook used for robustness.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Dow Jones (VentureSource); now part of CB Insights.
• Coverage: VC-backed startups, financing rounds, and funds, with the startup location and round-level detail that makes geographic and time-series analysis possible; deepest for U.S. VC.

Access (when licensed)

• Through a Dow Jones / CB Insights subscription. Extracts are obtained under a VentureSource / CB Insights data licence (download or API where entitled).
• Two linked grains. Fund-level records (fund size, vintage, LPs where available) and round-level records (startup, amount, date, investors, valuation) are different extracts that join on fund and company identifiers.
• Terminal or API credentials are required. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Coverage is built from disclosure, so it is selective. Rounds enter the database when they are reported; small, early, or undisclosed rounds are undercounted, and coverage thickens over time. A rising round count can reflect better reporting rather than more activity. Check coverage stability.
• Cross-check against a second source. VentureSource and PitchBook disagree on round amounts, dates, and even whether a round happened; conclusions that turn on one source are fragile. The citing paper uses PitchBook for robustness for exactly this reason.
• Valuations are sparse and noisy. Pre-money valuations are missing for many rounds and are often imputed or self-reported; conditioning on non-missing valuation selects larger, later rounds. State the missingness handling.
• Startup location changes over time. A startup’s HQ state is time-varying (relocations to hubs are themselves an outcome); using a single static location induces look-ahead bias in any migration analysis. Use the point-in-time location.
• Entity linking and renames. Startups and funds get renamed, merged, or re-IDed; joins to other data (Crunchbase, SDC, regulatory filings) must be built on names plus dates, not a shared key. Verify the link.

Citation

Cite the vendor and product, e.g.: VentureSource (Dow Jones / CB Insights), accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State whether fund-level or round-level data was used, the date range, and how location and valuation missingness were handled.