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Methodologyv1 · JUL 2026

What a stamp means, and what it does not.

AngelRun’s only claim is that someone here read the evidence behind a checkpoint before it counted. This page says exactly what that involves, what the Board does with it, and which parts we have not settled yet. If anything on the platform disagrees with this page, this page is wrong and we want to know.

What we measure

Counts, and the denominator each one came from. Checkpoints declared, checkpoints the founder marked reached, and checkpoints we verified. Weeks on the record. Whether an update was posted in a given week.

There is no score, no rating and no tier. There was one — a 0–100 index built out of weighted parts — and it was removed on 2026-07-29 for a reason worth keeping written down: the weights were our opinion, so the number was an opinion wearing a measurement’s precision. A reader cannot audit a blend. A reader can audit “three of six”.

For the same reason nothing here is published as a percentage. A fraction shows you what it was out of; a percentage hides it. Three verified out of six declared and three hundred out of six hundred are not the same fact, and 50% cannot tell them apart.

What a stamp is

  1. 01A founder declares a checkpoint and attaches evidence — a repository, a release, a working link, a number we can go and look at.
  2. 02Someone at AngelRun opens the evidence and checks that it shows what the checkpoint claims. Most declared checkpoints are never stamped.
  3. 03If it holds up, the checkpoint is marked verified and dated. That date is the moment we read it, not the moment the founder says the work happened.

A founder cannot mark their own work verified. This is not a policy we promise to follow — it is enforced in the database. The verified flag is writable only by the platform role; an attempt by any founder account is rejected outright, and an attempt to set it while creating a checkpoint is silently forced back to false. That is the whole moat: the one field an investor is asked to trust is the one field the subject of the record cannot touch.

A stamp is a statement about one checkpoint. It is not a view on the company, the founder, the market, or whether anyone should back them.

How the Board orders runs

The Board is ordered by one key, and it is the only input a founder cannot manufacture: the number of verified checkpoints.

Ranking keyVerified checkpoints. While a season is running only stamps dated inside that window count, so a project that opened months earlier holds no permanent head start over one that opened in week one. With no season running the Board is cumulative, and says so.
TiesBroken by the most recent stamp. Still level after that, and the runs share a rank — two projects level on stamps are level, and the Board says so rather than inventing an order.
Too earlyA run with fewer than 2 updates, or less than 14 days behind it, is listed and dated but not ranked. It has not yet done enough for a rank to mean anything, and a zero it did not earn would be worse than no number.
ShowcaseSeeded example projects appear, marked, and are never ranked. A marked example in a catalogue is honest; a seeded project holding first place in a standing is not.

Nothing about position is editorial. There is no promoted slot, and no founder can pay for one — founders are never charged for anything on AngelRun.

The Day 0 scan

When a project opens we scan the public landscape around its idea — repositories doing something similar, how much attention they have, what has been discussed publicly — and freeze the result as that project’s first record. It is dated with the scanning engine’s own timestamp and stamped with the engine version, because without knowing which instrument took the reading, a later re-scan cannot tell you whether the market moved or the instrument changed.

It is a measurement of the ground, not a judgement of the founder, and it is never rewritten. A founder cannot have it deleted — a record that disappears when it becomes inconvenient is not a record. They can append a dated response, and the disagreement becomes part of the record too.

What we have not decided

How big a checkpoint has to be to be worth verifying. Today that judgement is made case by case by whoever is reviewing, and we have not published a threshold. That is a real gap and this page will not paper over it: without a stated bar, a run could in principle accumulate stamps by declaring small things often.

It is listed here rather than quietly left out because a methodology page that only describes its settled parts is advertising, not methodology. When the bar is set it will appear here, dated, and the version at the top of this page will move.

Limits

A filter, not a recommendation.

AngelRun shows evidence and introduces people. It does not advise, does not recommend, and is not a party to anything you agree with a founder. A verified checkpoint is not an endorsement of the company or of the person, and nothing on this platform is an offer or a solicitation.

We do not collect financial details of any kind, and no part of any transaction happens here. What follows an introduction is between you and the founder, off this platform.

Every number on the platform is a count of something a person did or a stamp we applied. None of it forecasts anything.

v1 · JUL 2026If this page and the platform disagree, the page is wrong. For investors →