The tracker inherits IM’s primary-source discipline with a controlled allowance for the private-company subset where pure-primary data is structurally unavailable. Methodology version: v1.0.

Source-tier hierarchy

• Tier 1 — primary. SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, S-1, 8-K), earnings call transcripts, regulator publications, official company press releases and blog posts, founder / CEO posts where source-of-record.
• Tier 2 — credible secondary, acceptable for private companies with attribution. Named, internationally-respected business publications with editorial accountability, where the figure is sourced to a named primary statement (a founder quote, a funding announcement, an analyst call) and not editorial inference.
• Tier 3 — not acceptable. Generic market-sizing reports lacking disclosed primary sourcing, and “industry estimates” without an upstream named source. We do not cite numbers we cannot trace to a primary disclosure or a named secondary publication.

Metric definitions

• Revenue. Annualised run-rate revenue (ARR) for private companies; for public companies, AI-attributed revenue where disclosed, otherwise total revenue annualised from the most recent quarter.
• Usage. One headline usage figure per company — whichever the company itself reports (MAU, WAU, paid seats, API tokens, contracted backlog, etc.). We pick one per company and hold to it across cycles.
• Headcount. Full-time employees. Company-reported where available; otherwise LinkedIn-derived as a stage proxy.
• Funding to date. Cumulative disclosed equity (and debt where material) funding, USD.

Reconciliation rules

• Where two credible sources disagree by a material margin (>15%), the row carries an IM reconciliation footnote naming both figures and sources. The published number is the most recent primary or the most credible secondary — never an average.
• Where the disagreement is irreconcilable, we decline to publish that cell. The column shows — with a brief note.

Decline-to-publish rules

• No cell published from a Tier-3 source.
• No cell published where the back-series would require us to mix incompatible metric definitions (e.g., ARR in one quarter, Q4 × 4 in another).
• No estimate published where triangulation rests on a single Tier-2 source.

Cadence and change-log policy

• Monthly minimum, published on the last Thursday of each month. Mid-cycle hot-updates only for material disclosed events (earnings, funding round, acquisition).
• Every monthly publication adds a dated change-log entry. Material methodology changes are flagged in the entry and version-stamped on the page.

Operational discipline

Behind the published figures, each cell carries a private source register noting the source of record, alternate verifications, and the date the cell was last audited. The IM Auditor process applies a standing set of checks on every monthly update — verifying year-over-year consistency, cross-referencing acquisition and corporate status, sanity-checking growth rates against company-disclosed comparables. These working artifacts are not themselves published; they are the operating discipline that gives the tracker its month-to-month consistency.

Detailed triangulation methodology, source register and audit trail are available on request to credentialled institutional readers.