Buyer: seed/Series-A sourcing. Three decisions go into every row below, and they are different decisions: whether we have verified the identity, whether we hold evidence enough to publish a profile, and whether the company is a fit for this buyer. A published profile is not a lead. Fit we have not established is printed as not established and is never counted as qualified.
Of the 13 companies assessed, 3 are both published and qualified, and 5 are qualified with too little evidence to publish a profile. The two decisions come apart in both directions, which is why they are counted apart.
7 assessed companies below the inclusion bar are counted above but not named here: an unlisted company is reachable by URL and absent from every list, so naming it in a list would make it discoverable. Sign in as an investor or operator to see them.
Both legs hold. (a) Playground Global is a named institutional venture firm and the company’s OWN release states it led the round; its general partner Pat Gelsinger took a board seat, which is participation evidenced by the investor side as well. Segra Capital, NGP, Mercator Partners and Alumni Ventures are named as additional investors in the same release. (b) The stage band comes from the issuer, not from us: the release says "Additional investors in the Series A included...", so a source states SERIES A for this event. And the covered-event test has nothing to do over the evidence we hold: this is the only financing event ON RECORD HERE. THE SEARCHES THAT ESTABLISH THAT, with their exact scope, because absence is a statement about a search and never about the world (J, 2026-10-11): `registry.formd_filings where entity_name ILIKE %alva%` returned 0 rows; an EDGAR company-name search for "alva energy", type D, returned no companyName entries; two web searches for a later round (terms included "Series B", "new funding", "raising", "additional capital" and the CEO name) surfaced nothing after 2026-02-12. A filing or a later round could exist outside all three and we would not have seen it. So the defensible statement is that NO UNLABELLED EVENT IS KNOWN TO US after the labelled one - not that none exists - and on the evidence we hold there is no stale-stage inference of the kind Hermes caught on Clasp.
What would overturn this: A source stating a later financing event with a different stage band (which would make the Series A label stale the way Clasp’s seed label was), evidence that Playground Global did not lead, or evidence that the company is outside the buyer’s mandate.
Both legs hold. (a) True Ventures led a $5M round, with Wicklow Capital participating — a named institutional lead. (b) Coverage calls it a SEED, announced 2026-09-16, and it is the only financing event on record, so nothing later is unlabelled. Grades 6–12 voice tutoring, four full-time roles open in San Francisco, 1,000+ students through a closed beta before the raise. This is the buyer’s market band and the buyer’s stage.
What would overturn this: Evidence the True Ventures round was not a seed, or that the company is outside the buyer’s sector mandate.
Both legs of the unchanged rule hold. (a) Andreessen Horowitz is a named institutional venture firm and the round’s lead, stated by the law firm that advised the transaction and corroborated by several outlets; its general partner took a board seat. (b) Every source states SERIES A for the latest financing event (2026-10-09), and the $40M DCVC-led seed of 2026-09-15 is earlier and smaller, so nothing unlabelled sits after a labelled round. The stage label is VERIFIED and stands: J ruled that a large Series A is not automatically late-stage, and no check-size or valuation mandate exists to test it against.
What would overturn this: A source stating a later financing event with a different stage band, evidence that a16z did not lead, or a decision by J that a size/stage coherence test applies - which would move this to not_a_fit on mandate rather than on evidence.
Leg (a) holds: Base10 Partners LED a $1.5M round in February 2024, announced through the deal counsel, with Bedrock’s Eric Stromberg, Check’s Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker named as participants, and the company’s own job listing names Base10, Terrain and Conversion Capital. Leg (b) fails on the single standard: the latest financing event is the $13,249,996 sold on the 2026-10-08 Form D, it is LARGER than every labelled round and its money moved 2.3 years later, so it cannot be a tranche of the 2024 seeds — and no source labels it. Reading the 2024 label forward would be inferring stage from funding history. One announcement naming this round settles it in either direction.
What would overturn this: Any source labelling the $13.2M round. A seed or Series A label makes this company qualified; a Series B or later rules it out. Either way it stops being unknown.
The decisive failure is leg (a), and it is worth being precise because stage labels DO exist here. No institutional venture lead is identified in any source we reached: the $2.9M round The Robot Report covered was HEADED BY ECOAST ANGELS, an angel group; WPI contributed a $30,000 commercialisation grant; CB Insights adds an accelerator (Hexagon Sixth Sense), a fellowship and two individual angels. Again, absence of a finding, not a finding of absence. Leg (b) is separately unreliable rather than empty — five sources give five different round histories for the same company (Series A May 2022, Series B 2023-08-07, Series A1 for that same round, Series B 2025-10-10, Series A 2026-07-17), and the founding year is disputed too (2017 PitchBook, 2025 WPI). A buyer cannot act on a stage five sources dispute.
What would overturn this: A named institutional lead on a dated round.
A MANDATE MISMATCH, argued from what the company says it is — not from an absence of investors, and not from its age, revenue or offering size. The positive evidence: the founder’s own published bio calls HTD Health a digital health CONSULTANCY doing "strategy, design, and implementation of novel software systems" for care-delivery organisations, and the company’s own site sells exactly that. A buyer whose mandate is seed/Series-A equity in venture-scale product companies is not looking for a services firm, whoever has or has not invested in it. The earlier version of this verdict leaned on "no equity venture investor appears in any source I could reach", which cannot establish that none exists; that is now recorded as an open question and is NOT load-bearing. The profile stays published and accessible — this labels it for one buyer, it does not hide it.
What would overturn this: Evidence that the company sells a venture-scale product rather than services, or a named institutional venture investor in any round.