Read from the filing. Checked, named, nothing added.
The cheap lists of funded companies are built from announcements. The platforms read the filing and charge for a platform. Priorfile reads the filing, names the directors, checks whether anyone announced it, and sends your sector on Monday. Here is exactly how a number gets from a Companies House form into that email.
The legal starting point
When a UK limited company issues new shares, the Companies Act 2006 requires it to file a form SH01 — Return of Allotment of Shares at Companies House within one month of the allotment. It is not optional and it is not discretionary.
The form states, per class of share: how many were allotted, the nominal value of each, the currency, and the amount paid or unpaid on each share. That last figure is the money. Multiply it by the number allotted and you have the raise.
This is not earlier than the news, and the register does not claim to be. We tested it: of 60 companies that filed in the week to 28 August 2026, not one filing preceded a public announcement of the same money. Where an announcement existed, it came a median of 253 days before the filing, because companies with PR announce at close and file the instalments later. What the filing gives you is the 45 of 60 that were never announced at all. That is the product.
What Priorfile does with it
- Reads every filing, every working day. Around 750 SH01s are filed daily. The stream is monitored continuously and replayed from the last known position if a day is missed, so nothing is skipped.
- Opens the filed document. The structured summary Companies House exposes carries the aggregate nominal value, which is not the money raised — mistaking the two is the single commonest error in this category. The raise lives in the filed form, so the form is what gets read.
- Extracts per share class. A single filing can carry several classes with different prices. Each is parsed separately and summed.
- Filters out what is not a raise. Option exercises at nominal value, bonus issues, group reorganisations and property SPVs all file SH01s where no new money moved. Investment trusts, VCTs and leasing vehicles are removed by filing frequency; listed companies, whose allotments are announced by stock-exchange rule, are removed too.
- Names the directors. The officers and persons-with-significant-control registers are public and current by law. Each row carries the active directors, so the recruiter has a name, not a switchboard.
- Checks for an announcement. Press, news, the company’s own channels and its investors’ are searched for any public announcement of investment. The row says “None found” with the date checked, or “Reported” with the source. A company with no web presence at all is flagged; a desk should not waste a call on it.
- Cuts by sector and publishes on Monday with a link to the filing behind every line.
The traps, and how each is handled
These are the reasons a naive read of the same data produces wrong numbers.
Nominal value is not money raised
A company can allot a million shares of 0.0001p. The aggregate nominal value is £1. The amount actually paid might be £2m. Reading the summary field rather than the form understates real raises by orders of magnitude.
Aggregate versus per-share amounts
Some filers enter the total consideration in the "amount paid" box; others enter the price of a single share. Reading one as the other inflates a £90 allotment into an £82m one. Both conventions appear, sometimes in the same document.
Scientific notation
Roughly one filing in sixty states the amount in the form 4.0352E7. A parser that
stops at the first non-numeric character reads £4.04 instead of £40,352,000. Understatements are
dangerous precisely because they look unremarkable.
Bonus issues and capitalisations
Shares can be issued without cash. These filings look identical in structure to a funding round and must be excluded, or the register reports money that never moved.
Paper filings
Between 15% and 19% of SH01s arrive on paper and appear days later than electronic ones. They are added to the following week’s register rather than backdated silently.
Instalments
An amount is what one filing states, not the size of a round. Deep-tech and EIS companies draw a round down in instalments and file each one; 52% of companies file again within 90 days. A £130,000 filing can be tranche three of a £6m round announced last winter. The row says whether the company has filed before, and the announcement check catches the round it belongs to.
What you get
One email, Monday morning, for your sector. Company name and number, amount filed, sector, company age, active directors, the announcement check, valuation bounds where the filing supports them, and the filing link. That is the whole product.
What you will never get: a probability, a score, a prediction of who raises next, or an email address that bounces. The register states what the public record says and stops.
Accuracy, with its denominator
Thirty rows from the first live week, stratified across raises, option exercises, at-par allotments, non-sterling filings and sub-floor amounts, were checked by hand against the source documents. Thirty of thirty matched. That puts the true error rate below roughly ten per cent at 95% confidence; it is not a claim of perfection. Any figure that looks implausible is held back for manual review rather than published.
Source and licence
All company data comes from Companies House under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse with attribution. Priorfile is not affiliated with or endorsed by Companies House.
100 companies took the money last week. Three in four never told anyone.
The next register is published Monday. Read last week’s first — there is nothing to enter and nothing to book.
