European venture figures start from a different rulebook

The record

Dealroom is the provider most European venture reporting leans on, and it publishes its own account of how it builds that data. Dealroom's Our Data page, retrieved 16 September 2026, describes a round-tracking model that includes "every priced round, including undisclosed tranches," with particular attention to early detection of "seed-to-Series-A rounds." Dealroom's half-time report on H1 2026, published 30 July 2026, states that "startups raised over $500B in venture capital in H1 2026" globally, and separately that excluding OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, global venture funding is "still growing, on a $269B full-year projection."

What the sources establish

The methodology page establishes that Dealroom's inclusion process differs structurally from a disclosure-driven US series: it describes combining "machine learning and data engineering with robust verification processes," moving through stages it labels "Public Info Harvesting," "Data Engineering," "AI Processing" and "Manual Verification," and classifying companies against a "proprietary taxonomy" of more than 50 sectors rather than the round-size stage bands Crunchbase publishes. By contrast, PitchBook's published methodology builds its estimates from deals its own data-operations team collects and statistically extrapolates for late reporting, a different construction from Dealroom's per-company verification workflow. Neither page states that its total should equal the other's for the same period, and the H1 2026 report's own swing from near $500 billion to a $269 billion projection when three companies are removed shows how much a single provider's headline can depend on scope choices about which rounds to weight.

Scope and revision

Dealroom's $500 billion figure is global, not European-only, and the portion of the report available without the gated download does not break out a separate European total; readers should not assume "Dealroom" means "Europe" for every headline it publishes, only that Europe is where its coverage is often strongest relative to named competitors. The methodology page's claim to track more rounds than named competitors is a comparison Dealroom itself makes and states as its own measurement of coverage, not an independently audited count. Because verification is manual as well as automated, Dealroom's numbers can move as its team confirms rounds already flagged, on a timeline the page does not specify.

The decision in front of you

A founder or analyst using European data should check which provider is behind a cited figure before treating a "European venture capital" number as comparable to a US one, since scope, verification and stage definitions differ by construction rather than by choice of currency. This is an editorial caution beyond what either page states directly.

• Does this figure come from a provider whose primary strength and taxonomy is European coverage?
• Is the total global, European-only, or a different regional cut than the headline suggests?
• Would removing the largest few rounds change the trend, as it does in Dealroom's own H1 2026 breakdown?

A European series built on manual verification and a broad sector taxonomy is not lesser evidence than a US series built on disclosure extrapolation; it is different evidence, and the difference is worth stating before the two are placed on the same chart.