I built a piece of software I’ve wanted for a long time. I wanted it when I was a founder, when I was a partner at YC, and again now that I’m a founder again. It’s a database of startups, investors, and investments: the Venture Codex by Magid - and it’s available today.
You can find it here: https://theventurecodex.com/
And the extension here:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ffngcclekcokjjaidbgpenklabckkaff?utm_source=item-share-cb
The Venture Codex includes data on all public Seeds, Series As and Series Bs done in the US in the last 3(ish) years. It consolidates data from filings, press releases, VC sites, and social channels to reveal what investors (and funds) are actually doing - not just what they’re posting. We also build an AI model that allows users to build lists of likely investors.
That’s what. The why of it is a bit more interesting.
Back when I started working at YC in 2013, I started thinking about how and why rounds get done. Thanks to YC I got a pretty good understanding of that process around seeds via Demo Day. YC’s data on those rounds got quite good over time - we knew who did what, at what price, and how fast they moved. That was hugely valuable for founders because it provided them with a map of what investors they should talk to vs. avoid. It helped founders figure out what sort of deals were “standard” and what were “great.” The data gave us partners the information we needed to give better advice, to figure out which investors to spend time with, and which investors talked too much and did too little. This was a superpower, and one YC has continued to build internally to great effect.
Then, in 2018 I started to focus more on Series As and Series Bs because they just seemed more…confusing. The set of available investors for Series As at the time was unknown. Even when we knew the funds, we didn’t know much about the partners. We didn’t know if they actually invested or what size deals they generally did. Other than trying to talk to people on some irregular basis, we had no intelligence on who was good and who was active. Lucky for me - and for YC - we saw so many Series As and Bs that we were able to give our founders guidance. In fact, in about 2 years of paying attention, I worked with founders on nearly 200 rounds that raised ~$3 billion. Each round we saw through to completion fed the machine that helped the next founder going to raise.
I got hooked on that process. So, when I left YC in 2021, I doubled down on my obsession with fundraising. Unfortunately, I no longer had access to the incredible tools and data that I’d come to take for granted. So, I started exploring. I tried this tool and that one, this database and that whisper network. All along the way, in every conversation I had with a founder about the market, I’d get a variant on the same questions: “What does good look like?” and “Who should I talk to?” and “How the hell do I run a great process?” and “Why does that even matter”
Maybe stranger, I got the same exact questions from investors - particularly the ones building new funds and working hard to help and guide their own founders.
Which led me to realize something - everyone in the entire system is essentially flying blind. There’s data available in various places, but it’s hard to use or expensive or incomplete or just not what people need. Most VCs build up their knowledge of the market by meeting up with near competitors, with upstream and downstream partners, and by making notes in spreadsheets that get reviewed at Monday meetings. Every time a company needs to raise capital, they go back to the sheet and start again. Ask a VC how many different funds can lead a Series A and you’ll get an answer that is short by at least 1 order of magnitude.
Founders are in even worse shape, able to come up with the names of ten or twenty funds and maybe some partners who are loud on X or Linkedin. That’s not good enough.
So I decided to build my own tool to explore the full universe of fundraising data - at least the parts that founders and investors care about. That became the Venture Codex that Magid is releasing today.
The Codex is a research tool for emerging managers who need to know more about what their competitors and downstream partners are actually doing vs. what they might be posting. It is rooted in the actual deals getting done, and allows users to quickly look up information on any of the investors involved.
We’ve done the work of looking through Form Ds, press releases, VC websites, LinkedIn, and X so you don’t have to. We’ve pulled all that data together into a single experience designed around research.
But it goes further than that - we’ve created a central location that allows a user to quickly traverse funds, partners, and their activity. And then we built a small AI model that allows users to build lists of likely investors based on their actual activity - in other words the things they do, not just what they say.
Of course, the Codex is also valuable to founders. If you’re a founder who’s ever gotten an inbound email from an investor and thought “Who is this? Do they even invest?” the codex can answer the question quickly and accurately.
The Codex is a work in progress as we continue to add data. As it’s incomplete, the tool is free and in Beta for now. I’ll keep it free for as long as I can, though at some point I’ll have to figure out how to properly maintain it.
There’s nothing quite like the Codex. Near as I can tell, there’s nothing as focused, as tailor made for our specific use cases, as thoughtful about what matters, as easy to embed in your daily workflow. I hope you enjoy using it.
Aaron
P.S. about the data:
If you spot any incorrect data, tell us and we’ll fix it.
The Codex relies on publicly announced rounds, so if a round isn’t disclosed or some investors aren’t listed, the data may be incomplete.
Investor titles and affiliations change frequently. We update these through sweeps of VC websites, but it takes time to capture every change.
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Disclaimer: The Venture Codex is a research tool that provides information based on publicly available data. It does not provide investment advice or guarantee future results.
Love this. The search feature is great.
I love this tool, incredibly helpful and though our data is not entirely right, it mostly is. Super impressive for a beta release.