Pre-Seed Scouting With GitHub Signals: Finding Startups Before Their First Announcement

Pre-seed is the hardest stage to scout because the public footprint is thin. This post explains what GitHub activity does and does not reveal at pre-seed, why the signal is verification rather than discovery, and a workflow for combining it with the channels that do find pre-seed companies.

Key stats

2-4: Typical pre-seed engineering team size (a thin public footprint by definition)

14-day: Observation window (the default velocity read)

0: Cost to check a public GitHub org (the cheapest pre-seed verification available)

References

[1] Engineering Acceleration as a VC Deal Flow Signal: SSRN

[2] VC Deal Flow Signal Methodology: GitDealFlow

[3] GitHub REST API - Repositories: GitHub Docs