Grants, letters of intent and state capital are not priced rounds

Three kinds of non-round

A grant or public award is funding for a defined programme, frequently paid in tranches against milestones. A letter of intent is a non-binding statement of support that may never convert into cash. A state-parent capital injection recorded as registered capital changes a balance sheet without establishing a market price for the company. None of the three tells you what an outside investor would pay for equity.

The 2026 CHIPS Act letters of intent are a clean example: five separate notices, all with the same policy character, all with no cash amount. Treating them as five financings would be wrong even before considering how similar the resulting text would look.

Why the rows stay

Dropping them would hide the fact that a large part of quantum communication infrastructure and several domestic hardware programmes are funded through state channels. A reader who only saw venture rows would conclude those ecosystems are inactive. Keeping the rows on a separate government capital tracker, with the instrument named and the amount shown as undisclosed, preserves the information without corrupting the total.

Where a published announcement does bundle a grant with an equity round, we keep the single reported figure and note the mixed instrument rather than inventing a split. That case is documented in the equity-and-grants column of the annual review.

The counting rule in one sentence

Only disclosed cash attached to a priced instrument enters the funding totals; programme ceilings, letters of intent, registered capital and unpriced merger announcements are listed with an explicit not counted label. This rule is applied identically on every page, including the JSON, so a recomputation from the dataset produces the same number.

Policy-linked rows currently in the ledger

9 rows in the current ledger match this column's classification. Each row keeps its source and instrument label.

The practical takeaway

A policy notice is evidence of intent, not of capital deployed. Both facts are worth publishing; only one belongs in a funding total.