The OECD's venture chapter runs on PitchBook and Dealroom data

The record

The OECD's Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2026: An OECD Scoreboard, published 31 March 2026, presents official SME financing data for 48 countries, covering debt, equity and asset-based finance indicators from 2007 to 2024 and complemented by available 2025 data. This edition marks, in the OECD's own words, 15 years of the Scoreboard, and adds a thematic Chapter 2, "Leveraging venture capital for SMEs," reviewed by the OECD Committee on SMEs and Entrepreneurs on 6 March 2026 and covering global VC market trends and government VC programmes.

What the sources establish

Unlike the Scoreboard's core debt and asset-based finance indicators, which are compiled from national statistical sources, Chapter 2's venture-capital figures are not an OECD-collected series. The report's own Annex B states there is "no international standard" for breaking venture capital down by stage, and names PitchBook and Dealroom as the two commercial sources behind the chapter's VC and PE statistics, each classifying investment stages differently both from each other and from the OECD's own framework.

Scope and revision

The annex goes further than most cross-provider disclosures in this pack by naming a specific quality difference between its two commercial sources: PitchBook draws on venture-capital associations that collect data from VC funds directly, while Dealroom collects from news coverage and the startups' own reporting -- a gap the OECD's own annex says means "Dealroom figures may be overestimated" relative to PitchBook's. That means a country-level VC figure in this Scoreboard is only as comparable across countries as the mix of PitchBook- and Dealroom-sourced data behind it, and is not comparable to a national statistical office's own venture count without checking which of the two commercial sources, if either, that office also draws on.

The decision in front of you

Editorially: when citing an OECD Scoreboard venture-capital figure, name the underlying commercial provider from Annex B rather than attributing the number to "the OECD" alone, and flag the Dealroom overestimation risk the OECD itself documents wherever a Dealroom-sourced figure appears.

• Does this Scoreboard figure come from Chapter 1's national statistical indicators or Chapter 2's PitchBook- or Dealroom-sourced venture data?
• Which of the two commercial providers underlies this specific country figure, and does Annex B's stage-definition table apply to it?
• Is a Dealroom-sourced figure being compared to a PitchBook-sourced one without accounting for the OECD's own overestimation caveat?

A standards body's own scoreboard can still rest on the same handful of commercial data vendors as everyone else -- the OECD's contribution here is naming that dependency and its consequences in a public annex, not replacing it with a government census.