Alternative Data for Venture Capital: Why GitHub Is the Most Underused Signal

Alternative data transformed public market investing over the past decade – satellite imagery, credit card data, app downloads. Venture capital has been slower to adopt it, despite the most accessible alternative data source sitting in the open: GitHub. GitHub engineering data is continuous (updated daily), free (public API), hard to fake (commits represent real work), and reveals intent (activity type indicates company phase). Almost no investor monitors it systematically, creating an information asymmetry for those who do.