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Fact check: How does factually.co disclose funding and ownership?
Executive Summary
The documents provided do not directly show how the domain or entity "factually.co" discloses funding or ownership; instead they reference three distinct organizations with similar names—Factual (location data company), FactCheck.org, and The Factual (news rating company)—each with different disclosure practices and timelines. The most concrete disclosures in the set are a 2010 SEC Form D for Factual Inc. and a 2025 funding summary for FactCheck.org that describes institutional endowment support and donor reporting; no source explicitly documents disclosures for the specific domain factually.co [1] [2] [3].
1. Confusion in the record: three similar names, three different disclosure stories
The corpus shows a recurring problem: name collision between distinct entities—Factual (a location-data firm), FactCheck.org (a nonprofit fact-checker), and The Factual (a news-rating startup later acquired by Yahoo)—and none of the excerpts explicitly tie to the domain factually.co. The investor and funding profile that Tracxn records for Factual reports $105 million raised across four rounds and lists institutional investors including Upfront Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, DCVC, and Index Ventures; this summary is dated April 25, 2025 and reads like a commercial funding database entry [2]. A separate SEC Form D filed in 2010 attributed to Factual Inc. discloses a $27,276,620 amount sold and names individual investors such as Gilad Elbaz, Ben Horowitz, and Danny Rimer, but the filing is an old regulatory snapshot and does not map cleanly to current ownership or to any factually.co domain [1]. The available materials therefore suggest no single authoritative disclosure record for "factually.co" among these documents.
2. What the nonprofit model reports: FactCheck.org’s public funding disclosures
The sources identify FactCheck.org as practicing transparent funding disclosure: it reports being supported by the Annenberg Public Policy Center endowment, donations, and grants from entities including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Google News Initiative, and Meta; it also discloses donors giving $1,000 or more and provides periodic financial breakdowns according to the 2025-dated text [3]. That account implies a structured disclosure regime typical of nonprofit journalism—endowment backing plus donor and grant transparency—along with explicit reassurances that certain funders “do not control editorial decisions.” The dates on these entries are April 28, 2025, indicating current practices as of that publication, but the materials do not claim relationship to the factually.co domain [3].
3. Corporate filings and investor lists: what legal documents reveal and what they don’t
For the commercial entity labeled Factual, the Tracxn funding summary and the older Form D together create a disparate picture: a modern aggregate funding total of $105 million and a 2010 regulatory filing for $27.3 million that lists prominent individual investors like Gilad Elbaz and Ben Horowitz [2] [1]. SEC Form D filings disclose capital raised in exempt offerings and investor identities at the time of filing but do not by themselves explain current ownership percentages, control arrangements, or subsequent rounds. The juxtaposition of a 2010 Form D with a 2025 funding summary highlights how public disclosure can be fragmented over time and why relying solely on an archival filing can misrepresent current ownership or disclosure policies [1] [2].
4. The missing link: no direct evidence for factually.co’s own disclosures
None of the supplied documents include a WHOIS, an “About” page, a donor list, or a corporate filing explicitly for the domain factually.co; a WHOIS tool description was present but did not identify factually.co’s registrant [4]. The Yahoo acquisition materials reference The Factual (a separate startup acquired in 2022) and therefore do not establish disclosure practices for factually.co; they illustrate how acquisitions can change ownership disclosure but again are unrelated to the queried domain [5] [6]. This gap means that any claim about how factually.co discloses funding and ownership is unsupported by the provided sources, and additional primary documentation (the site’s transparency page, a current WHOIS lookup, or a corporate filing) would be required.
5. How to interpret these records and what to ask next
Given the mixed records, the prudent interpretation is that disclosure practices vary by organizational type: nonprofits like FactCheck.org publish grant and donor information and emphasize editorial independence, while startups and private companies may disclose investor rounds via commercial databases and SEC filings that only partially reveal ownership. To resolve the question for factually.co, request the domain’s own transparency or about pages, a recent WHOIS record, or any relevant corporate or nonprofit filings; absent those, mapping common names to corporate registries or archived Form D filings can mislead because of name collisions [3] [1] [2]. For factual certainty, prioritize contemporaneous, domain-specific documents over analogous entries for similarly named organizations.