Four instruments, four counting rules

What each instrument actually is

An IPO or STAR Market listing records proceeds from a first public sale of shares. A SPAC merger may be announced long before it is priced, and the announcement itself has no cash value. An at-the-market programme is an authorisation to issue shares up to a ceiling over time. A follow-on public equity offering is a discrete later sale of shares. Our round field preserves that wording instead of normalising all four into a generic funding round.

This is why two rows for the same company in the same year are not automatically duplicates. A listing and a later offering are genuinely different events; an announcement and a priced close of the same merger usually are not. The de-duplication rule is applied to reports, not to instruments.

Why we keep them

Deleting public-market rows would make the ranking look more like a venture database, but it would understate the capital available to the companies that actually build hardware. It would also create a strange discontinuity: a company would appear in the table while private and vanish once listed. Keeping the rows with an instrument label is the only option that lets a reader construct either view.

The government capital tracker and the annual reviews both use the same classification, so a figure quoted from one page can be traced back to the same row on another.

The comparison rule

If you compare a private Series B with an ATM ceiling, say so. If you want a private-capital-only comparison, exclude the public instruments and note the exclusion in your citation. We do not provide a single toggle that silently changes the total, because the instrument mix is part of the finding rather than a filter to be hidden.

Public-market instruments currently recorded in the ledger

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

The practical takeaway

The instrument field is not decoration. It is the difference between a defensible funding table and a number that changes meaning every time someone reads it.