Stealth Mode Watch: Another Nail In The Coffin Of ‘Stealth’

Sunday, 05 September 2010 05:51

Stealth Mode Watch: Another Nail In The Coffin Of ‘Stealth’

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Stealth Mode Match, a searchable data spider of often very revealing SEC form D filings, is the brain child of Denis Papathanasiou, who came up with the idea while researching funding options (a.k.a spying) for his ebooks startup Fifobooks,

“I was just using it to keep tabs on specific investors and other competitors in the ebook space, but I mentioned it to a few people, and they were interested enough to want to use it themselves.”

Papathanasiou then added a public API and launched it in beta under its own domain. Right now the site allows a simple search mode which shows results for the past four weeks and then an extended API mode which allows results past that date as well as filtering parameters like “people,”"companies” and “places” (Humans beware: The data is delivered in XML files).

Papathanasiou says he got the idea from First Round Capital Managing Director Josh Kopelman’s “The Death of Stealth Mode,” which warned startups of the perils of filing series D forms.

“If you’re starting a company and want to stay in “stealth mode”, make sure you understand the impact of your Form D filing and factor that into your plans. And if you’re a lawyer for a startup company, please tell your clients about the public disclosures you make on their behalf!”

In the meantime, watch your back McClure.

CrunchBase Information

First Round Capital

Dave McClure

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