219 Startup Fundraises With Pre-announcement GitHub Activity Metrics (commit Velocity, Contributor Growth, Repo Creation) [CC BY 4.0]

I spent the last year tracking public GitHub activity across 4,200+ startup orgs and backtesting whether engineering acceleration precedes fundraise announcements. The result is a dataset of 219 documented fundraises paired with the GitHub activity metrics observed in the weeks before each announcement.

What’s in it: for each fundraise event, commit velocity over trailing 14-day windows, distinct contributor counts over 30-day windows, new public repo creation, sector classification, funding stage, and the lead time between signal and announcement (21-47 days in the cases where the pattern fired).

Dataset (Zenodo, CC BY 4.0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19650920

Methodology preprint (SSRN): https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6606558

Honest caveats: roughly 23% false-positive rate (acceleration sometimes means an enterprise deal or open-source push rather than a round), stealth companies with no public repos are invisible to this approach, and AI-heavy startups are noisy because model releases create commit spikes.

Everything comes from the public GitHub REST API v3, no scraping or private data. Happy to answer questions about the panel construction or backtest design.