Shaulablog

A company I talked to recently was using the excuse that they were fundraising quickly because they wanted to have a good showing in their SEC filing before the tech press spots their Reg D filing and outs them.   I hadn’t realized that Reg D filings had become so visible but indeed they have (if you know what to look for).  It took a few minutes of hacking the completely obtuse search protocol, but I ended up with something that seems worth sharing. There’s a good bit of fundraising going on.

I figured out I could go to the SEC Edgar database boolean search page and use this search string:  State=WA and type=D.  There were also a few under State=WA and type=D/A.  (form D amended)

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar?text=State%3DWA+and+type%3DD&first=2012&last=2012

You can click through each company, and click their document and you’ll find out who the officers are, what their contact info is, how much they are raising and how much they have raised.  Neat stuff if you didn’t already know it.

After a little more digging on EDGAR, I found a page with more help on formulating searches.  It gives the tip that you can narrow by industry using SIC codes, but since those codes are ancient it’s of limited utility. I tried to guesstimate what kind of search I might set up as a member of the Northwest Energy Angels, but after some head scratching I found a study on renewable energy companies by the Wa State Department of Commerce where the researchers concluded “Based on discussion with several energy researchers, we determined that using SIC codes for most sectors was not a feasible analytic approach, given their lack of specificity regarding many energy efficient and renewable energy technologies. Additionally, the two state agency databases we used to obtain employment and revenue data classified companies by four-digit, rather than six-digit, SIC codes, which are insufficient to distinguish most categories of energy efficiency and renewable energy companies. ”  So so much for that.

For a scraped and formatted version you can check out FormDs   http://www.formds.com/locales/seattle