UK Startup Funding Digest
I use this as a daily discovery feed. Early-stage funding is often the signal to reach out about a role.
The problem
UK Startup Funding Digest is a daily pipeline that finds early-stage UK funding rounds and logs them to a spreadsheet automatically. The problem it solves: tracking that funding by hand means reading dozens of sources every day, and the tools that exist are either too broad (US-heavy, every stage) or sit behind an expensive subscription. There was no lightweight, UK-specific, early-stage-only feed.
The approach
- 01 Fetch
- 02 Extract
- 03 Deduplicate
- 04 Log
- 01 Fetch
Every morning the pipeline pulls the last 24 hours of UK startup news.
- A dozen UK-focused news sources are polled in parallel on a daily schedule.
- Anything older than 24 hours is filtered out before processing, so only fresh rounds get through.
- 02 Extract
Claude reads each article and pulls the funding round out of the prose.
- For every genuine early-stage round it extracts company name, amount, stage, lead investors, and source URL.
- Articles with no funding news are dropped, because the model classifies, it doesn't pad.
- 03 Deduplicate
The same round, reported by five outlets, must land as one row.
- A composite key built from company name and amount identifies a round regardless of which outlet reported it.
- A second sighting updates the existing row instead of creating a duplicate.
- 04 Log
Confirmed rounds are written to a Google Sheet.
- One clean row per round (company, amount, stage, investors, source) ready to act on.
Engineering challenges
- One round, many reports
A single funding round gets written up by half a dozen outlets within a day.
- Poll a dozen sources and the same seed round appears again and again.
- An unfiltered feed of duplicates is noise, not intelligence.
Rounds are identified by what they are, not where they were found.
- A composite key of company name and funding amount is stable across every outlet.
- The sheet write is an upsert keyed on it, so a re-report updates the row, never adds one.
- Structured data from unstructured prose
A funding announcement is a paragraph of journalism, not a record.
- Amount, stage, and lead investors are phrased differently in every article, and most articles aren't about funding at all.
An AI extraction step does the classifying and the structuring in one pass.
- Claude reads each article, decides whether it reports an early-stage round, and if so returns the fields as structured data.
- Non-funding articles are discarded here, so nothing downstream has to second-guess the input.
The workflow
