Understanding deal flow: how VCs source, evaluate, and track startup investment opportunities.
Deal flow is the lifeblood of venture capital. It refers to the stream of investment opportunities that a VC firm evaluates. The quality and quantity of your deal flow determines your returns.
Traditional deal flow relies on who you know. Signal-based deal flow relies on what the data tells you. The best investors use both, but signal-based sourcing gives you access to deals that never enter the referral network.
A typical seed-stage VC evaluates 500-1000 companies per year and invests in 5-15. The goal is not more deal flow, but better filtering of the flow you have.
GitDealFlow: VC deal intelligence and startup signal tracking. Learn more →
This explainer is part of a library built on a single dataset: public engineering activity across 350+ startup GitHub organizations, 15 sectors, refreshed weekly. The through-line is that deal flow signal is earliest in code: breakout teams appear 21 to 47 days before their round is public. Concepts on this page are defined precisely because imprecise vocabulary is what makes sourcing decisions unfalsifiable.
A practical read-through of What Is Deal Flow in Venture Capital?: the dataset behind this page refreshes weekly across 350+ organizations and 15 sectors, and every figure shown traces to a public GitHub REST API pull. That matters for two reasons. Reproducibility: any number here can be re-derived from primary sources, which is the standard the published methodology sets for itself. Timeliness: engineering acceleration precedes announcements, so this page follows the data cadence rather than the news cycle, and the freshness endpoint always reports the exact pull date.
If What Is Deal Flow in Venture Capital? is your entry point, the fastest next steps are fixed: skim the glossary for the three or four terms that anchor the topic, open the research dataset to see the raw weekly snapshots behind the summary numbers, and run one live query against the free momentum checker with a company you already know well. Seeing the signal fire on a familiar name is the quickest way to judge whether code-side sourcing belongs in your own workflow.
One caveat worth stating plainly on What Is Deal Flow in Venture Capital?: momentum is a leading indicator, not a verdict. A repository can accelerate for reasons that never become a fundraise, and a quiet quarter does not mean a team is failing. The disciplined use of this page is as one input in a stack, a way to rank where scarce diligence time goes, and a way to notice change early. The methodology page documents every limitation, including the bot filter, the two-period confirmation rule, and the sectors where coverage is thinnest.