Methodology & Data Sources
Last updated: 6 July 2026
This page explains where PE Deals data comes from, how we verify and normalise it, and what our figures do and do not claim. We publish it in the interest of transparency for the professionals who rely on our data.
1. Where our data comes from
Our deal records are assembled from several sources:
- Editorial monitoring: our automated scrapers track UK financial press, deal announcements, and press releases daily, extracting structured deal details with a citation back to the original article.
- Direct submissions: deals submitted by brokers, advisors, and companies through our submission form, reviewed before publication.
- Companies House: official UK company registration data and financial filings, used to enrich company profiles.
- Tech.eu Funding Explorer: UK funding rounds and exits ingested from the Tech.eu Funding Explorer, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence. Records sourced this way carry an attribution notice on the deal page.
Every deal links to at least one original source so you can verify it independently.
2. Currency conversion
Values are reported in GBP. When a deal is announced in another currency, we convert it using the European Central Bank reference rate on the deal's own announcement date (or the nearest prior business day), rather than a single flat rate. Deals announced in GBP are stored at their exact stated amount. Where a deal value is undisclosed, we show it as undisclosed — we never estimate or impute a figure.
3. Sector classification
Source data uses inconsistent sector labels — the same sector is often spelled differently, and some deals span several sectors. We normalise these into a single canonical taxonomy: multi-sector deals are split so the deal is counted in each relevant sector, and spelling variants are merged. A deal that touches more than one sector is therefore reflected in each, which means sector deal counts can sum to more than the total number of deals.
4. Entities: investors, acquirers, and advisors
Investor, acquirer, and advisor names are resolved to consolidate obvious variants of the same organisation. We take a conservative approach and do not aggressively merge names we cannot confidently match, which means some near-duplicates may remain rather than risk incorrectly combining distinct firms.
5. Deduplication & verification
The same transaction is frequently reported by multiple outlets. We detect likely duplicates (same company and date) and merge them into a single best record, retaining the most complete details and all cited sources. Records with missing, implausible, or future-dated values are flagged for review. Corrections are only made from cited sources.
6. What we do not claim
- Our dataset is not exhaustive. It reflects deals we have been able to source and verify, and coverage is stronger in recent periods.
- Undisclosed deal values are never estimated.
- Deal-type and sector labels are normalised automatically and may occasionally mis-classify an edge case.
- Analytics and rankings are computed directly from the underlying records; they are descriptive summaries of what we hold, not forecasts or investment advice.
7. Attribution
Records ingested from the Tech.eu Funding Explorer are used under CC BY 4.0 and attributed as "Tech.eu Funding Explorer" with a link to the source, both on the relevant deal pages and here.
8. Corrections
If you spot an error in a deal record, please let us know via our contact page and we will review it against the cited sources.
