The short version
Where you see a figure like ≈ $90–107bn on a listing, that is not us hedging. It is us showing you that the published sources genuinely disagree, and telling you why.
These figures are indicative. They are a starting point to consider and check with the business itself — not a basis for a financial decision. We are not a financial adviser and nothing here is investment advice.
Why one number is often the dishonest answer
Take a large venture capital firm. Its assets under management might be reported as $90bn in one place and $106.5bn in another. Both are correct. They measure different things: one is the figure the firm uses when it announces a fund, the other is the regulatory measure, which counts money investors have committed but not yet paid in and is calculated before borrowing is netted off.
If we printed one of those and not the other, we would be making a choice you could not see. So we print the range and label both ends.
What a range means here, and what it never means
Every end of a range is a figure somebody actually published. A range is a statement about disagreement between real sources. It is never a statement about our own uncertainty, and it is never a guess dressed up as a spread.
Specifically, we do not:
- estimate a figure nobody has published — if there is no source, we show nothing;
- interpolate, extrapolate, or widen a range “to be safe”;
- borrow a figure from a similar business;
- merge measures of different things — a fund’s size is not the same as a firm’s assets under management, and money deployed is a third thing again, so we keep them apart even when a source runs them together.
What we attach to every figure
- The basis — what each end of the range is actually measuring.
- The source — a link to where we read it.
- A date — financial figures age badly, and an undated one is worse than none.
- Whether it is self-reported— most of these come from the business’s own website. That is worth knowing. A company describing its own size is not the same as an independently filed number, and we mark which is which rather than blurring them together.
Where this does not apply
Ranges are for financial and scale figures. They are deliberately not used elsewhere, because in other places a range would hide rather than reveal:
- Benchmark scores. Two benchmarks with different methods are not two estimates of one quantity, so averaging or spanning them would be meaningless. We record a score against the specific benchmark it was measured on, or we record nothing.
- Published prices. A price list is exact and you can check it yourself. We quote it as published.
- Ratings and review counts. Never estimated and never ranged. These come from real reviews or they do not appear.
Why we do not rank by these figures
You will not find a league table on this site ordered by an indicative figure. If two firms sit within a few percent of each other, the difference between them is smaller than the uncertainty in the numbers, and placing one above the other would claim a precision the data does not support.
Where size is worth showing, we group into bands instead — and a band is something we can stand behind.
Tell us when we are wrong
If a figure on your business’s listing is out of date or misread, we want to fix it. Claim the listing or get in touch, and point us at the source — the source is what we will change it to.