License

Free to use, with credit.

Our research and our database are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Anyone may use them, including in commercial work, as long as they credit the Institute.

Effective 24 September 2026.

Colibrí Institute is an independent nonprofit, and we publish so that others can build on the work. One license applies to everyone who uses it, whether you are a researcher, a journalist, an allocator, a fund manager or a company. The full legal text is at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.

What you may do

You may copy, share and republish our work in any format. You may adapt it: filter the database, combine it with other data, chart it, translate it or build it into a tool. You may do all of this for any purpose, including commercial use, and you do not need to ask us first.

How to credit us

Credit is the one condition. For anything drawn from the database, a source line that reads Data: Colibrí Institute, with a link to colibri.institute/database, is enough. Where there is room, add the date you downloaded the data. The database refreshes every hour, so the date tells your reader which version they are looking at.

For a white paper or note, cite the paper itself by its authors, title, year and link.

The license also asks you to link to it and to say whether you changed anything. If you filtered, recalculated or combined our data with another source, a few words are enough.

Short credit
Data: Colibrí Institute
Full credit
Source: Colibrí Institute VC Database, colibri.institute/database, downloaded 24 September 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Adapted work
Data: Colibrí Institute, filtered and combined with the author's own analysis. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

What the license covers

The license covers everything the Institute publishes on colibri.institute unless it is marked otherwise: our white papers and notes, their exhibits and charts, our definitions and methods, the database, and every file you export from it. In the database, that includes how records are selected, matched and organized, the evidence labels, and the fields we derive, such as funding status.

What it does not cover

Some material on the site belongs to others, and our license cannot give it away.

Public records
SEC filings such as Form D and Form ADV are public records, and you can use them without our permission. The license covers what we built from them.
What firms say about themselves
The stated tier of the database reports what a firm or limited partner says on its own website, with a link to the page. Text quoted from those sites belongs to its author.
Third-party data
The white papers analyze fund-level data licensed from PitchBook. That underlying data is not published and is not covered by this license. Neither are figures we credit to another source, such as the market context on our homepage.
Our names and logos
The license does not cover the Colibrí Institute or Colibrí Strategies names, our logos or the founder portraits. The media kit explains how to use the logos. Crediting us is welcome; presenting your work as ours, or as endorsed by us, is not.

People in the database

The database names people who appear in public filings and on firms' own websites. Our license covers our work, not the people it describes, and it does not change your obligations under privacy or other laws when you use information about a person. Demographic details appear only where a person or their firm disclosed them publicly, and nothing in the database is inferred from a name or a photograph. Please hold your own use to the same standard. Our privacy policy explains how we handle personal information.

Keep the evidence labels

This is a request, not a condition of the license. Every record in the database says how we know it: filed with the SEC, or stated by a firm on its own site. They are different kinds of fact, and we never add them together. When you republish our data, please keep the label with each row and keep the two kinds apart in any total. The database methodology explains each label.

No warranty

We check our work and publish our corrections, but the research and data are provided as they are, without warranty of any kind, as the license itself states. The database refreshes every hour from new filings, so a figure you downloaded may change later. It describes the public record; it is not investment advice.

Questions

If you are unsure whether a use is covered, or you would like to tell us what you built, write to hello@colibri.institute.