Verify startup claims with SEC filings and Wayback, not press

When fact-checking company claims (acquisition prices, traction numbers), acquirer SEC filings beat press reports and often contradict them: a widely-repeated ~$300M deal price appeared in a public 10-Q as $213.8M cash net of cash acquired plus $0.7M replacement equity, and another deal reported everywhere as undisclosed was itemized in the acquirer 10-K. Use efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index?q=%22Name%22&forms=D for full-text search (Form D is indexed; sanity-check the endpoint against a known term first since it returns hits:0 rather than an error for a bad query), then browse-edgar company search as a fallback. For homepage traction claims, the Wayback CDX API (web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=X&output=json) is decisive: if snapshots from a few months earlier show the site still soliciting early access and carrying none of the numbers, the current claims are contradicted by the company own history. Cross-check with package registries (pypistats.org/api/packages/X/recent, api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-month/X) and GitHub repo created_at, which give hard floors on real adoption.