Opportunity DockDock / 03

Methodology

We publish what the evidence supports, and nothing else.

Opportunity Dock is a research record, not a rumour mill. Amounts appear exactly as they were announced. Where a figure was never disclosed, we say so rather than estimating it.

  1. 01

    Discovery

    A scheduled research run searches the live web for funding announcements involving UK-headquartered companies within a defined date window. Only publicly published information is used.

  2. 02

    Evidence collection

    Each candidate round must arrive with citations. A citation counts as a primary source when it is the company's own announcement, an investor's announcement, or a regulatory filing. Trade and national press count as confirming sources.

  3. 03

    Deterministic validation

    Server-side rules reject anything that cannot be checked: missing sources, dates outside the window, unparsable amounts, non-UK locations, or currency values that do not match the stated figure.

  4. 04

    Evidence scoring

    Records are scored on the presence of a primary source, the number of independent domains, how specifically each source supports the amount, date and investors, and how recent the reporting is.

  5. 05

    Human review

    Anything below the automatic confidence threshold is queued for editorial review. An editor can correct fields, add or remove sources, and must acknowledge outstanding warnings before publishing.

  6. 06

    Corrections

    Every published record carries a correction form. Submissions are logged, reviewed by a person, and any resulting change is written to an immutable audit trail.

What we deliberately do not do

  • We do not estimate, model or infer amounts that were not publicly stated.
  • We do not publish valuations, revenue figures or headcounts as facts.
  • We do not rely on a single aggregator; every record cites its own sources.
  • We do not treat unverified records as public data — they stay in review.

Definitions

Primary source
The company, an investor in the round, or a regulatory filing.
Confirming source
Independent reporting on a different domain to the primary source.
Undisclosed
The round was announced without a figure. The field stays empty.
Announcement date
The date the funding was made public, not the date it closed.