Sponsorship and Disclosure

These hold regardless of who is paying, how much, or how long they have been doing it.

1. 01

   A listing is never for sale.

   Every organisation on the map is here because it belongs on the map. No company has ever paid to be added, to rank higher, to be described differently, or to be left off.

2. 02

   A number is never for sale.

   Nothing a sponsor does changes a figure in a report, a definition, a survival curve or a salary count. If a paying company appears in a statistic it dislikes, the statistic stands.

3. 03

   A report is never written to order.

   A sponsor may fund a report. It does not choose the question, see the findings before publication, or approve the text. If that is unacceptable, we are the wrong publisher.

4. 04

   Anything paid says so, in the place you read it.

   Not in a footer, not on this page alone. A sponsored report carries its sponsor at the top. A paid link is marked where it sits and carries rel="sponsored".

5. 05

   We do not take money to recommend a supplier.

   The guides name what a thing costs and what the rules are. Where we have not put a price range, it is because we could not verify one, and a referral fee will not make that number appear.

6. 06

   A correction is never negotiable.

   If a number here is wrong, it gets corrected and the correction is visible, whoever is paying and whoever it embarrasses.

Report sponsorship. A named supporter of a piece of research, credited on it, with no involvement in the question or the findings. The model is a funded study, not an advertorial.

Data licensing. Access to the underlying dataset for people who want to work with it directly rather than read a page about it. Paying for the data changes nothing about what the data says.

Clearly marked recruitment placement. If paid job placement is ever introduced, a paid role will be visibly labelled as such and will never displace an unpaid one from a listing, a count or a report.

Display advertising. Not because of the money, but because a page carrying a bank’s banner beside a figure about banks has already answered the reader’s question about independence, whatever the figure says.

Paid inclusion, paid removal, or paid ranking anywhere on the map or in any report.

Unmarked affiliate links of any kind, and affiliate arrangements with any supplier a guide compares against another.

Copy approval. No sponsor, advertiser, licensee or listed company reads a report before it is published.

Sageo SIA is a Latvian company, so it is inside the thing this site counts. It is on the map, listed on the same terms as every other organisation and carrying a note on its own record saying who publishes this. Hiding it would be the stranger choice: a reader who found it missing would wonder what else was.

It is also counted in the register-wide statistics, because those are censuses of every active Latvian company and quietly removing one to look impartial would be a worse distortion than leaving it in. In the reports that measure startups and scaleups specifically it does not appear, not out of delicacy but because it is a service provider and those reports exclude every service provider.

Where a person or company connected to the publisher appears in something we write, that connection is stated in the piece, at the point it becomes relevant.

Tell us, in public if you prefer. Write to vinayak@sageo.ai. A breach of this policy is a correction like any other, and it is noted on the affected page rather than fixed quietly.

The rest of how this site is built, and the frozen definitions every recurring number is computed from, are on the methodology page.