How to Track Startup Funding Rounds Programmatically

A few months ago, a couple of friends came to me with a problem. They needed to track startup funding rounds for their work, but they didn't have an IT background. They were drowning in press releases, LinkedIn posts, and paywalled databases, trying to figure out who got funded and how much.

Since I'm the "tech guy" in my friend group, they asked for help. I figured I'd just write a quick Python script to scrape the data for them. How hard could it be?

It turns out, it's a nightmare. And it's the exact reason I ended up building ParheliaWeb.

The Scraper Reality Check

Here is what my first prototype looked like. It's the kind of script a lot of developers write when they just need data quickly:

import requests
from lxml import html

def scrape_funding(url):
    response = requests.get(url, headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"})
    tree = html.fromstring(response.content)

    # These selectors work... until the site redesigns
    companies = tree.xpath("//h2[@class='company-name']/text()")
    amounts = tree.xpath("//span[@class='funding-amount']/text()")

    return [{"company": c, "amount": a} for c, a in zip(companies, amounts)]

I handed it over, and it worked great for about a week. Then the real world hit:

• The site added a paywall.
• Cloudflare started blocking my IP.
• They redesigned the site and changed every CSS selector.
• I realized the amounts were all over the place ("€5M", "5 million euros", "Series A of undisclosed size"). My script didn't know how to handle that.
• I had to deduplicate the same funding round because it was posted on three different news sites.

I ended up spending more time fixing broken selectors, normalizing currencies, and handling rate limits than actually helping my friends. I was building an infrastructure project, not a data tool.

The API Approach (What I Use Now)

After realizing that scraping was a massive time sink, I decided to stop fighting the websites and start structuring the data properly. I built ParheliaWeb to be the API I wished I had when my friends first asked for help.

Here is how you get the exact same data in 5 lines of clean Python:

import requests

API_KEY = "your_api_key_here"  # Get one at parheliaweb.com

response = requests.get(
    "https://parheliaweb.com/v1/funding",
    headers={"x-api-key": API_KEY},
    params={
        "max_age_days": 30,
        "max_records": 10
    }
)

data = response.json()

for round in data["results"]:
    print(f"{round['company_name']} raised {round['funding_amount']} "
          f"in {round['round_type']} ({round['announcement_date']})")

And instead of messy text strings, you get back clean, structured JSON that you can actually plug into an app or a dashboard:

{
  "user_tier": "pro",
  "count": 10,
  "max_age_days": 30,
  "last_crawled": "2026-07-03T10:30:00Z",
  "results": [
    {
      "company_name": "Acme AI",
      "funding_amount": "$5 million",
      "round_type": "Series A",
      "announcement_date": "2026-06-15",
      "source_url": "https://techcrunch.com/...",
      "source_status": "active",
      "sector": "Artificial Intelligence",
      "currency": "USD",
      "country": "US",
      "lead_investor": "Sequoia Capital",
      "is_extension": false,
      "investor_count": "5"
    }
  ]
}

No parsing. No deduplication. No 4 AM alerts when a website changes its layout. It just works.

The Real Cost Comparison

If you are trying to decide whether to build your own data pipeline or use an API, here is what I learned from the trenches:

Factor	Build Yourself	Use an API
Time to first result	2-4 weeks	5 minutes
Ongoing maintenance	5-10 hours/week	0
Data quality	Variable (you clean it)	AI-extracted and human-verified
Coverage gaps	Your problem	Handled
Compliance (GDPR, etc.)	Your risk	Handled
Cost	Your time + infrastructure	€29/month

My rule of thumb: If your core business is data collection, build it. If your core business is using the data, use an API. Let someone else worry about the CSS selectors.

Getting Started

Questions?

I'm Andy, the founder. I'm just an IT guy who likes solving problems for people. If you have questions about the data or the API, just drop me a line.

📧 info@parheliaweb.com