How to Find Companies That Just Raised Funding: 7 Steps
The free path to recently funded companies, with the exact clicks: LinkedIn post-search strings, Google Alerts on the wire services, SEC Form D on EDGAR, a logging sheet that dedupes the three, the step from company to budget owner, two templates and a labelled worked example.
Here is how to find companies that just raised funding without paying for a database: search LinkedIn posts for the announcement phrases founders use, filtered to the past week; set Google Alerts on the press-release wires for your sector; and, for US companies, check Form D filings on the SEC's EDGAR system, which catch rounds the news never covers. Log every round in one sheet, find the person who owns the new budget, and message within the week about what the money changes. The strings, clicks and templates follow.
What you need to find companies that just raised funding
| Item | Why | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| A LinkedIn account | The announcement post is the earliest public signal for most rounds, and the people engaging with it are your map to the buyer | Free |
| A Google account | Google Alerts emails you new matches from news and press-release sites | Free |
| A browser and 20 minutes a day | EDGAR and the alert emails are read, not automated, on the free path | Your time |
| One spreadsheet | Three sources will surface the same round twice; the sheet dedupes them and holds the follow-up dates | Free |
| Optional: Crunchbase Pro or Sales Navigator | Saved-search notifications and more history once the free sources are not enough (step 5) | Paid |
Decide before you start what "just raised" means for you. A round announced three months ago is still useful for a long sales cycle and useless for a short one. The routine below assumes the past seven days for daily checks and the past 30 days for the first list you build.
Step 1: Decide which rounds count
A funding round is a trigger event: a change in the company's situation that gives it a new reason to buy, not proof that anyone there is buying yet (the lesson on what a trigger event in sales is covers the difference). So the first step is to write down which rounds create a reason to buy your product, because a seed round and a growth round change a company in different ways.
Write four filters and keep them next to the sheet:
| Filter | Question to answer | Example (hypothetical seller of payroll software for agencies) |
|---|---|---|
| Stage | Which round sizes mean they will hire and buy the thing you sell? | Seed and Series A: first finance hire arrives, payroll moves off the founder's laptop |
| Sector | Which industries match your customer profile? | Marketing, design and recruitment agencies |
| Geography | Where can you sell and support? | United States, United Kingdom, EU |
| Headcount after the round | How big will they be in six months? | 10 to 60 people |
A round that passes all four goes in the sheet. One that fails any of them does not, however exciting the announcement. Most of the time wasted on funding signals is spent on rounds that were never a fit.
Step 2: Search LinkedIn posts for the announcement
Founders announce rounds on LinkedIn, usually the same morning the press release goes out and often earlier. The post names the round, the lead investor, what the money is for, and, in the comments and reactions, the people who care about the company. That makes LinkedIn post search the first daily check.
The clicks: type a phrase in the search box, press Enter, select the Posts tab, open Date posted and choose Past week, then set Sort by to Latest. Save the result as a bookmark; LinkedIn keeps the filters in the URL.
| What you want | Search string (paste as written) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Any announcement in your sector | "excited to announce" raised agencies | Swap agencies for your sector word; keep the quoted phrase |
| Seed rounds specifically | "we raised" "seed round" | Also try "pre-seed" and "seed funding" |
| Series A specifically | "Series A" "led by" | "Led by" appears in nearly every announcement and filters out commentary |
| Rounds from a specific investor | "led by [investor name]" raised | Use the funds that back your existing customers |
| Investor-side announcements | "thrilled to back" OR "proud to lead" | Partners sometimes post before the portfolio company does |
| What the money is for | raised "to hire" sales | Surfaces posts that state the use of funds, which is your opener in step 7 |
Run three or four of these a day, not all of them. For each post that passes the step 1 filters, log the company, the poster, the round, the date and the post URL in the sheet, then open the reactions and comments once: a head of finance or a new COO congratulating the founder is a name for step 6.
If a post search becomes your whole morning, this is the step to hand to software. Intentsly's LinkedIn signals watch keyword posts for phrases you choose and the people who engage with them, and score each person against your customer profile, so the announcement and the budget owner arrive as a ranked list. Funding databases and EDGAR are not something Intentsly monitors; those stay a manual check.
Step 3: Set Google Alerts on the press-release wires
Google Alerts is free and does the same job for the news side. Google's help page lists the steps as: go to Google Alerts, enter the topic in the box at the top, select "Show options" to adjust settings, then select "Create Alert" (Google, Create an alert). The options on that page are how often, sources, language, region, how many, and which account receives the emails.
Create one alert per line below, set How often to "As-it-happens" for the first two weeks (then "At most once a day" once you know the volume), Sources to "News", and Region to your market:
"raises" "seed" agencies software
"Series A" "announced today" agencies
"funding round" site:prnewswire.com agencies
"funding round" site:businesswire.com agencies
"secures" "funding" "to expand" agencies
Replace agencies with your sector word in every line. The two site: lines catch the wire services most companies pay to distribute their release; the first and last lines catch trade press that rewrites it. Expect overlap with step 2; that is what the sheet in step 6 is for.
Step 4: Check SEC Form D on EDGAR for US rounds that never made the news
Many US rounds are never announced. Companies raising under Regulation D still have to tell the SEC, and that filing is public. The SEC's page on the form says a company must file "within 15 days after the first sale of securities in the offering", and that Form D notices "must be filed online using the SEC's EDGAR" system (SEC, Filing a Form D notice). A Form D filing is a company that just took money, whether or not it has told anyone else.
The clicks, from the SEC's own FAQ on its full-text search (SEC, EDGAR full-text search FAQ): open EDGAR full-text search, click More Search Options, use Browse Filing Types to choose form type D (and D/A for amendments, which can mean a further close or a correction), set the date range to Last 30 Days for your first list and Custom for a weekly window after that, and put any phrase you want matched in double quotation marks. The search covers filings submitted electronically since 2001, so there is history if you want it.
What Form D tells you and does not tell you:
| It gives you | It does not give you |
|---|---|
| The issuer's legal name, state and address, and a revenue range | A description of what the company does (the industry group is one pick from a fixed list) |
| The date of first sale and the amounts offered and sold so far | The investors' names, only how many have invested |
| Names and addresses of executive officers, directors and promoters, in the related persons item | Email addresses or LinkedIn profiles; the form has no email field |
| Whether the filing is new or an amendment | Rounds raised outside the US, or under exemptions that do not require Form D |
Those columns come from the form itself, items 1 to 16 (SEC, Form D). So the EDGAR routine is: scan the issuer names in the result list, open the ones in your geography, read the related persons section for the founder's name, and take that name to LinkedIn to confirm the company, the sector and the headcount against step 1. Expect this to take about ten minutes a day and to turn up two kinds of company the news never covers: the quiet first-time raiser and the second close that was not worth a press release.
Step 5: Add a database or Sales Navigator when the free sources run dry
The free path covers one sector and one region well. It gets thin when you sell across many sectors, need rounds from more than a month ago, or want someone else to run the searches.
Crunchbase's own description of its Pro plan lists notifications on saved searches and lists, "up to 2k exports" of its data, and a 7-day free trial (Crunchbase support, What can I do with Crunchbase Pro). The useful habit there is the same as step 2: one saved search per stage and sector pairing, notifications on, exported to the sheet weekly. LinkedIn's Sales Navigator benefits page mentions "funding updates" among the real-time insights it shows sellers, without detailing a filter (LinkedIn, Sales Navigator benefits), so expect it to help more with accounts you already track than with discovery. Prices for both change; check the vendor's page the day you decide.
Whatever you add, keep the free steps running. The database tells every subscriber about the same round on the same morning; the LinkedIn post and the Form D filing are often a day or more earlier.
Step 6: Log, dedupe and find the person who owns the budget
The sheet turns three noisy feeds into one list. One row per company, these columns:
| Column | What goes in it | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Legal or trading name, one spelling | Search the sheet before adding; the same round arrives from two or three sources |
| Round and date | Stage and the date you first saw it | The earliest of your sources, not the press-release date |
| Source | LinkedIn post URL, alert email, or EDGAR accession number | Keep the link; you will quote the post or the use of funds in step 7 |
| Use of funds | The sentence from the post or release ("to grow the sales team", "to open a London office") | Blank if not stated; do not guess |
| Budget owner | The person who will spend the money on what you sell | See below |
| Status | New, Contacted, Replied, Meeting, Closed | Move it every time you touch the row |
| Next action date | When you send the next message | Blank rows are dead rows |
The budget owner is the step most sellers skip, which is why most funding outreach lands on a founder who forwards it to nobody. A seed-stage company has no VP; the founder or the first operations hire is the buyer. At Series A and beyond, the use-of-funds line tells you who: "to grow the sales team" means a head of sales exists or is about to; "to expand into Europe" means someone owns that expansion. Open the company's People tab on LinkedIn, filter by the title, and look at who joined in the last three months. The guide to finding decision makers on LinkedIn has the search strings for each department if the People tab is not enough.
Fill the budget owner column before the row is allowed to move to Contacted. If the person does not exist yet (the hire the round will fund), log the founder and set a next action date four weeks out to check whether the role has been filled.
Step 7: Message within the first week, about the consequence, not the congratulations
Every seller with a database saw the same round, and most of them sent "Congrats on the raise!" followed by a pitch. The message that gets a reply skips the congratulations and talks about what the money changes for the person reading it. Send it within the week of the announcement, while the plan is being made and before the new hires start.
LinkedIn connection note to the budget owner:
Saw the Series A post said the round goes into the sales team. The first month of a new SDR's list is usually the bottleneck we see at that stage. Happy to share the one-page process we use if it helps.
Email to a founder at seed stage, when there is no budget owner yet:
Subject: your first ops hire
Hi [first name],
Read the seed announcement, and the line about moving off spreadsheets for payroll stood out. We built [product] for agencies at exactly that size, and the thing that usually breaks first is contractor payments across two countries.
If that is on your list for the next quarter, I can send over how two agencies your size set it up in a week. If not, no reply needed, and good luck with the hiring.
[Your name]
[Company], [city]
Follow up once at day 3 with one new sentence (a short example, a relevant number of your own, a question rephrased) and once at day 10 with a close-out. Three touches in two weeks is enough for this signal; a round-based message that gets no reply in two weeks is usually early, so move the row to a 60-day revisit rather than a fifth touch. The guide on how to write a LinkedIn outreach message covers the structure if you want to write your own versions.
A worked example: Quillon Books' first two weeks
Quillon Books is a hypothetical example invented for this guide: a three-person company selling bookkeeping software to small agencies, with one founder, Tomas, doing all the outreach. He set the step 1 filters to seed and Series A, agencies in marketing, design and recruitment, US and UK, 10 to 60 people.
Week 1: three LinkedIn post searches each morning surfaced 9 announcements that passed the filters; the Google Alerts added 4 more from the wires, 2 of which were already in the sheet from LinkedIn; EDGAR turned up 3 Form D filings in his states for companies that had posted nothing. 14 rows. He filled the budget owner column for 11 of them (founders at seed, a new head of operations at two of the Series A companies) and logged the other 3 as "hire pending" with a check-in date.
Week 2: he sent 11 first touches, each quoting the use-of-funds line from the sheet, followed up at day 3, and had 4 replies by the end of the week: 2 "not yet, ask again in Q1" (moved to the 60-day revisit), 1 referral to the incoming finance hire, and 1 meeting booked with a Series A agency whose post had said the money was for "operations and hiring". The 3 EDGAR-only companies had no announcement to quote, so he opened with the industry and the state instead; 1 of the 3 replied to ask how he had found them. None of these counts are a benchmark; they are what the sheet looks like when the routine is followed.
The one first-hand run we can cite is our own launch: we ran Intentsly's LinkedIn signals and AI SDR against founders posting about cold outreach burnout and booked 14 qualified demos in 14 days with zero manual outreach, at a reply rate 4x our previous cold campaigns. Funding was not the signal there, but the mechanism was the same: a public post, a person attached to it, and a message about the problem the post described.
Where this goes wrong
- Opening with congratulations and a pitch. The founder received forty of those the same morning. If the first sentence could be sent to any funded company, it will be read as the fortieth. Quote the use-of-funds line or do not send.
- Messaging the logo instead of the person. A funding announcement names the company and the investors, not the buyer. Rows without a budget owner are not ready, however fresh the round. Step 6 exists for this.
- Treating the database as the earliest source. By the time a round is in a database it is in everyone's database. The LinkedIn post and the Form D filing are the early feeds; the database is the archive.
A fourth, quieter one: ignoring the step 1 filters because the round is large. A big raise in the wrong sector is still the wrong sector, and the time spent on it comes out of the rows that fit.
What to do with the list
After a month the sheet has rows in every status, and each status has one action. New rows get a budget owner within two days or a "hire pending" date. Contacted rows get their day 3 and day 10 touches on schedule, then move to Replied, Meeting or the 60-day revisit. Revisit rows are the quiet asset: a company that raised in November and said "not yet" is often ready in February when the hires have landed, and your message then can reference both the round and the hire, which almost nobody else will do.
Review the sheet on Fridays for the pattern in the Replied rows: which stage, which sector and which use-of-funds phrase produced conversations. That pattern becomes next month's step 1 filters. If you want the LinkedIn side of this done for you, see which buyers match your profile right now, with no account needed, and keep EDGAR and the alerts as your ten-minute manual check. The other guides cover the message, the decision maker and the list in more depth.
FAQ
Is there a free way to find recently funded startups?
Yes. LinkedIn post search with the announcement phrases, Google Alerts on the press-release wires, and SEC Form D filings on EDGAR are all free, and between them cover most announced rounds in a sector plus the US rounds that were never announced. The cost is about 20 minutes a day of reading and one spreadsheet to dedupe them.
How soon after a funding round should you reach out?
Within the first week, while the spending plan is still being made and before the new hires start. A message on the day of the announcement competes with the congratulations; day two to day seven is usually clearer. If nobody owns the budget yet, log the founder and come back in four weeks when the hire has landed.
Who should you contact at a company that just raised?
The person who will spend the money on what you sell, which the use-of-funds line usually reveals: a head of sales for "growing the sales team", an operations lead for "scaling operations", the founder at seed stage where no such role exists. Check the company's People tab for anyone who joined in the last three months.
Does every funding round show up on Crunchbase?
No. Databases depend on announcements, filings and submissions, and many rounds are never announced. For US companies, the SEC's Form D filing is required within 15 days of the first sale, so EDGAR catches quiet rounds; outside the US there is no single equivalent, and the LinkedIn post or the investor's own announcement is often the only trace.
Can you filter LinkedIn search by recently funded companies?
Not on a free account; LinkedIn's post search with phrases like "we raised" and "led by", filtered to the past week, is the workaround and it is early. Sales Navigator's own page mentions funding updates among its real-time insights without describing a filter, so expect it to help with companies you already track more than with discovery.
What should the first message to a recently funded company say?
One sentence that shows you read what the money is for, one sentence about the problem that spending creates for the reader's role, and one easy question or offer. No congratulations, no deck, no request for thirty minutes. Keep a LinkedIn note under the field limit and an email under a hundred words, and follow up twice.
