Technical.ly is automating searches for venture capital raises. Meet Funding Bot

In five communities and growing, we at Technical.ly aim to be a reliable source of information.

We aim to tell you things no one else does — or can, in the way we do. That means fast, accurate and contextual.

One of the types of news many of you look to us for is of the investment variety. Given how private private companies can be, raising outside capital is a rare glimmer of transparency. For business reporting, it’s a mechanism to track firms that are prioritizing a growth trajectory and, often, testing new business models and customer types.

Over the last decade, Technical.ly has become a dependable place for startup founders to share their investment deals in our communities. But the landscape continues to shift. So we want to be even more competitive for our readers.

Technical.ly is working with New York City startup Vigilant to automate searches of federal SEC Form D filings. Whenever certain filings in one of our markets publish, the relevant details are scraped, sorted and put into paragraph format, informed by past versions written by our editorial team. The written copy gets dropped into our CMS for final approval and fact-checked by our editors (critically, we are retaining a human’s final review). We call this Funding Bot — as named by Editor-in-Chief Zack Seward, who is expertly shepherding this artificial-intelligence pilot for us by humanizing its work. Here’s an example.

I first met Vigilant founder Mike Phillips because we are both grantees of the Lenfest Institute.

In the first couple months of the pilot, what’s most interesting is that the speed of automation has let our newsroom do better reporting, faster. For example, Funding Bot immediately flagged last month’s funding round from blockchain startup Amino Payments. But rather than post the Funding Bot copy, our lead reporter Roberto Torres used that tip to drive his own reporting for a richer, more contextual story for you. We were first to report the news.

So, founders, here’s one more reason to consider Technical.ly a resource for your funding news.