research-company

name	research-company
description	Deep-research a company from minimal input (a name, ideally a name + website) and produce a structured intelligence report — age, founders, funding, key people, products, tech stack, and recent news. Use when the user asks to "research [company]", "look up [company]", "do a company profile / dossier / due diligence on X", or drops a company name + URL expecting a writeup. Pulls from Tracxn, Crunchbase, PitchBook, LinkedIn, SimilarWeb, BuiltWith, G2/Capterra/Product Hunt, TechCrunch/Axios/The Information, SEC EDGAR, Owler, Wellfound, The Org, and Apollo/Clearbit.
disable-model-invocation	true

Company Research

Produce a sourced intelligence report on a company from as little as a name (better: name + website).

0. Disambiguate FIRST — the hard gate (do not skip)

Nothing else runs until identity is locked. Company names collide constantly — "Fathom" alone matches an AI notetaker, a medical-billing startup, a drug-discovery firm, a web-analytics tool, and a podcast app. This step happens in the orchestrator (main agent), once, before any researcher is spawned — the whole fan-out inherits the identity you lock here, so a mistake here poisons every downstream report. The parallel researchers do not re-disambiguate.

Lock identity:

• If the user gave a website, that is the source of truth. Record the canonical domain (follow redirects — fathom.video → fathom.ai).
• If they gave only a name, run one search and list the candidate companies (domain, sector, location, founders).
  • If there's an obvious single match, take it and state which one you locked (so the user can correct you).
  • If two or more are plausible, stop and ask the user with a follow-up question (use AskUserQuestion, one option per candidate with domain + sector). Do not guess. Never silently merge two same-named companies — one bad funding figure poisons the whole report.

Resolve per-site slugs (still in the orchestrator). Same-named companies share the trap that a wrong slug silently returns the wrong company (Owler's /company/fathom → a different Fathom; The Org's /org/fathom → a podcast app, while /org/fathom-video is correct). Before fan-out, find and verify the canonical slugs you can — Crunchbase org, LinkedIn /company/, G2, The Org, Product Hunt — by confirming each page's domain/sector matches the locked identity. Pass the verified slugs to the researchers; tell them which you couldn't confirm.

Record the disambiguation key in the frontmatter (website + sector, plus hq/founded when known) — that's the canonical identity, and refresh runs check against it. Don't add a separate identity line in the body.

0.5 Fresh vs. refresh

Before researching, check whether a file for this company already exists in Data/Companies/.

• No file → fresh run. Research from scratch; the changelog gets a single initial entry (see §5).
• File exists → refresh run. Read the existing file first. Use its frontmatter (website + sector) as the disambiguation key so you research the same company, and note its researched date and current facts (funding, headcount, stage, products, key people). Do the research as normal, then compare against the old file:
  • Surface the changes in chat as a short "What changed since <old date>" list (e.g. "Headcount 120 → 185", "New Series B", "CTO departed"). If nothing material changed, say so.
  • Rewrite the document with the refreshed report + updated frontmatter (researched = today).
  • Append a new dated changelog entry summarizing the diff (see §5).
  • Preserve the existing changelog history — never delete past entries.

1. What to gather

Core fields (always attempt):

• Identity — legal/brand name, canonical domain, HQ, sector, one-line description
• Age — founding year + years operating
• Founders — names, prior companies, notable background
• Funding — total raised, rounds (date / stage / amount / lead), investors, valuation if known, accelerator (YC etc.)
• Key employees — C-suite and other notable leaders (CTO, VPs, heads of)
• Products — what they sell, key features, target customers, pricing if visible
• Recent news — last ~12 months: launches, raises, pivots, layoffs, competitive moves
• Headcount — employee count + trend
• Tech stack — frameworks, analytics, hosting, CRM (BuiltWith/SimilarWeb/search)
• Traffic / traction — monthly visits, growth, revenue estimates
• Reviews / market position — G2/Capterra/Product Hunt ratings, competitors
• Public-company data — if public or pre-IPO, SEC EDGAR filings

Grab anything else useful: open roles (signals priorities), partnerships, customer logos, controversies.

2. Source playbook (shared reference for all researchers)

Three tools, in escalating order: WebSearch (find URLs + harvest snippets), WebFetch (load pages that allow it), and the camoufox-cli skill (anti-detect browser that clears Cloudflare/bot-detection on sites that 403 WebFetch). Each source below is tagged with how it behaves through all three (verified June 2026):

Source	Use for	WebFetch	camoufox-cli	Best path
Company's own site	Products, pricing, positioning, compliance	✅ (follow redirects)	—	WebFetch
Tracxn	Founding, funding, investors, headcount, competitors	✅ full profile	—	WebFetch
SimilarWeb	Traffic, geos, rank, revenue/headcount bands	✅	—	WebFetch
TechCrunch	Funding + product news, growth metrics	✅ articles	—	WebFetch
Product Hunt	Launches, upvotes, ratings	✅	—	WebFetch
G2	Ratings, review counts, pros/cons	❌ 403	✅ clean (exact rating + count)	camoufox
The Org	Org chart, key people	⚠️ wrong-company risk	✅ real chart at the correct slug	camoufox + verify slug
Crunchbase	Investors, rounds, people	❌ 403	⚠️ passes Cloudflare but $ amounts obfuscated; investors/rounds/people visible	camoufox for structure, snippets for $
PitchBook	Valuation, deal history	❌ 403	⚠️ login-gated shell	search snippets
Capterra	Ratings, pros/cons	❌ 403/404	⚠️ needs correct URL	snippets / camoufox
LinkedIn	Founder/exec background, headcount	⚠️ partial (no titles)	❌ authwall (needs login cookies)	search snippets
Wellfound	Headcount, jobs, funding	❌ 403	❌ DataDome CAPTCHA	search snippets
Owler	Revenue/competitor estimates	❌ timeout

Rules of thumb:

• Escalation order per source: WebFetch → (if 403) camoufox-cli → (if CAPTCHA/authwall/paywall) WebSearch snippets. Don't retry a 403 with WebFetch — escalate.
• camoufox ≠ paywall bypass. It defeats bot-detection (Cloudflare), not login/Pro gates. Crunchbase/PitchBook still hide dollar figures logged-out — get those from search snippets.
• Verify identity on every camoufox load — check title/domain matches before trusting data; a wrong slug looks plausible (Owler/The Org both fail this way).
• Triangulate ≥2 sources for funding/headcount; they disagree constantly. Report the range + flag the conflict, never a false single number.
• Cite every non-obvious claim with its source URL.

3. Execution — orchestrate parallel researchers

You (the main agent) are the orchestrator. You disambiguate, fan out five researcher subagents in parallel, then synthesize their findings into the report. You do not gather most data yourself — you delegate it.

1. Disambiguate + resolve slugs (§0). Lock identity — asking the user if 2+ candidates are plausible — and verify the canonical per-site slugs. Do not proceed until this is solid.
2. Check fresh vs. refresh (§0.5). On a refresh, read the existing file first and pass its known facts to the researchers as a baseline.
3. Spawn the five researchers in parallel — one Agent call each, in a single message so they run concurrently. Pass every researcher the same locked identity block: company_name, canonical website, sector, hq/founded if known, the verified per-site slugs (and which are unconfirmed), and the current date. The agents:
   • researcher-company-funding — rounds, investors, valuation, total raised, stage, SEC.
   • researcher-company-people — founders, execs, key employees, org, headcount.
   • researcher-company-product — products, features, pricing, integrations, reviews, competitors.
   • researcher-company-traction — traffic, revenue estimate, tech stack.
   • researcher-company-news — last ~12 months of news. Each returns a compact, cited findings block (not a full report). Each may use the camoufox-cli skill for bot-blocked sites.
4. Synthesize. Collect the five blocks, reconcile conflicts across them (esp. headcount/funding — prefer ranges + caveats), and drop anything a researcher flagged as a namesake. If a critical facet came back thin or a researcher failed, do a quick targeted gap-fill yourself or re-spawn that one researcher.
5. Write the report (§4–§5): frontmatter + short summary + TOC + sections + changelog. Render locations as wikilinks and create any missing Locations/ notes (§5). On a refresh, also surface the "what changed" diff in chat.

Scale to the ask: a quick "look up X" can still run all five (they're cheap and parallel); a deep dossier is the same flow with more gap-fill iteration in step 4.

4. Output

Save the finished report as a Markdown file in the Companies directory (the skill's working root, Data/Companies/), named with the pretty company name only — e.g. Fathom.md, Acme Corp.md. Use the brand name as the user would write it, not the domain. On a refresh run (§0.5), overwrite the existing file but carry the prior changelog forward. Also print the report inline in chat — and on a refresh, lead with the "What changed" summary.

Frontmatter (machine-readable)

Every saved file MUST begin with a YAML frontmatter block so the directory stays queryable. Schema (the format is still evolving — keep keys stable, add new ones as needed, omit any you can't fill rather than guessing):

---
company_name: <pretty company name> # required
website: <canonical url>             # required (follow redirects to the real domain)
linkedin: <company page url>         # if it exists — the /company/ page, not a founder profile
crunchbase: <organization url>       # if it exists
founded: <year>                      # optional
hq: "[[City]]"                       # optional — Obsidian wikilink, quoted (see §5); list for multiple
sector: <one-line category>          # optional
stage: <e.g. Seed, Series A, Public> # optional
total_funding: <e.g. $21.8M>         # optional
researched: <YYYY-MM-DD>             # required (date of this run)
---

Rules:

• company_name, website, and researched are mandatory; everything else is best-effort.
• Only include linkedin/crunchbase when you have a verified URL (confirm the company-page slug via search — don't construct it). Omit the key entirely if unverified.
• Use the /company/<slug> LinkedIn URL, never a personal founder profile.
• It's fine to add extra keys (e.g. ticker, twitter, pitchbook, employees) when the data is solid and useful for later filtering.

5. Report format

This file is meant to live in an Obsidian vault. House rules:

• No top-level H1 title — the filename is the title. Every section heading is an H1 (#), not ##.
• Blank line after every heading before its content.
• The disambiguation key (domain + sector) lives in the frontmatter, not the body — no identity line.
• After the summary paragraph, emit the Table of Contents block verbatim (it's powered by the Obsidian TOC plugin — reproduce it exactly, including the fenced ```table-of-contents block, on every report).
• Location links. Every city you name as a company location (HQ, offices) is written as an Obsidian wikilink to its bare city name — [[San Francisco]], not San Francisco, CA and not [[San Francisco, CA]]. Wikilinks resolve by filename across the vault, so the bare [[City]] form works from anywhere. This applies in both places:
  • Frontmatter hq — a quoted wikilink, e.g. hq: "[[San Francisco]]" (the quotes are required, or YAML parses [[...]] as a nested list). For multiple locations use a YAML list of quoted links: hq:\n - "[[London]]"\n - "[[Austin]]".
  • Body — the same [[City]] link in Key Stats and/or the summary. For each city you link, ensure a note exists at Data/Locations/<City>.md; if it doesn't, create an empty stub so the link isn't broken (that's the existing convention — the location notes are empty placeholders). Don't link a city that only appears as a namesake/excluded-company detail.

Body starts with a short summary paragraph, then the TOC block, then the sections:

<Short summary paragraph (2–3 sentences, ~50–70 words): what the company does, who for, and the one most notable thing about it right now. Keep it tight — the detail belongs in the sections below.>

# Table of Contents
```table-of-contents
title:
style: nestedList # TOC style (nestedList|nestedOrderedList|inlineFirstLevel)
minLevel: 0 # Include headings from the specified level
maxLevel: 0 # Include headings up to the specified level
include: 
exclude: /Table of Contents/
includeLinks: true # Make headings clickable
hideWhenEmpty: false # Hide TOC if no headings are found
debugInConsole: false # Print debug info in Obsidian console
```

# Key Stats

- Founded · Stage · HQ (as a `[[City]]` wikilink) · Headcount · Total raised · Latest round

# Founders & Leadership

- **Name — Role.** Background, prior companies.

# Funding

| Date | Round | Amount | Lead / Notable investors |

Total raised, valuation (if known), accelerator. Note source conflicts.

# Product(s)

Features, target customers, pricing, integrations.



Traffic, revenue est., headcount trend, tech stack, market position vs. competitors.



  One line. [source]



What couldn't be confirmed; sources that disagreed; disambiguation risk.



Markdown links to everything cited.



  — 
 

The Changelog lives at the very bottom of the file and grows downward (newest entry last). Keep entries succinct — one sentence max, plus an optional short nested bullet list (a few items at most).

• Initial (fresh) entry: just record that the profile was created, e.g. **2026-06-30** — Initial research. No detail dump.
• Refresh entries: a one-sentence summary of what actually changed since the last run, with optional nested bullets for specifics (e.g. funding, headcount, leadership, product). If nothing material changed, write e.g. **2026-09-01** — Refresh; no material changes.
• Never rewrite or delete older entries.

6. Quality bar

• Lead with a short (2–3 sentence) summary paragraph, then the Table of Contents block, then a Key Stats bullet list the user can scan in 5 seconds.
• Obsidian formatting: no H1 file title, all section headings are H1, blank line after every heading, and the verbatim table-of-contents block right after the summary.
• Distinguish confirmed facts from estimates (SimilarWeb revenue bands, Owler guesses).
• Always include Gaps & Caveats — an honest "couldn't verify X" beats a confident wrong number.
• If two same-named companies exist, say so explicitly.
• On a refresh, lead the chat reply with what changed since the last run; keep the file's changelog entry to a sentence (+ a few optional nested bullets).