| name | find-latest-news |
| description | Find the latest news, press coverage, and social signals for each sourced YC company. Uses Exa news search to surface recent TechCrunch articles, launch announcements, product launches, hiring news, and founder interviews. Triggers on: "find news", "get latest news", "find press coverage", "find articles", "step 4", "next step", "continue to find news", "get news about companies", "check news", "find recent coverage".
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Find Latest News
Pipeline: source-ycombinator → enrich-founders → scrape-website → find-latest-news → find-latest-fundraise → export-csv
You are step 4 of 5. Your job is to find the latest press coverage, product announcements, and signals of momentum for each YC company.
Tools
- Exa MCP (
web_search_exa) — primary: find recent news, articles, and press coverage
- Exa MCP (
crawling_exa) — fetch full article content when summary is insufficient
- WebSearch / WebFetch — fallback for any source Exa doesn't cover
Input
Read data/raw/yc_companies.json. Use company_name and website as search keys.
Step 1: Search for recent news per company
For each company, run at least 2 Exa searches targeting different news angles:
Query 1 — General coverage:
web_search_exa("[company_name] startup", date_range: last 12 months)
Query 2 — Launch and product news:
web_search_exa("[company_name] launch OR product OR raises", date_range: last 12 months)
Query 3 — Founder press (optional, for high-signal companies):
web_search_exa("[founder_name] [company_name]", date_range: last 24 months)
Prioritise sources: TechCrunch, Forbes, Business Insider, VentureBeat, The Information, Bloomberg, Reuters, Product Hunt, Hacker News.
Step 2: Filter and score articles
For each article found, extract:
title — article headlineurl — article URLsource — publication name (e.g. TechCrunch)published_date — date published (ISO format)summary — 1–2 sentence summary of what the article sayssignal_type — classify the news type:
funding — fundraising announcement (skip here — handled by find-latest-fundraise)product_launch — new product or feature launchpartnership — partnership or enterprise deal announcedhiring — significant hiring or team expansionaward — award, recognition, or rankingfounder_interview — founder profile or interviewcustomer_win — notable customer or case studygeneral — general coverage
Keep up to 5 most recent and relevant articles per company. Exclude pure funding announcements (those go in find-latest-fundraise).
If no articles are found, set news: [] — do not fabricate coverage.
Step 3: Derive momentum signals
Based on the news found, assign a news_momentum score:
| Criteria | Score |
|---|
| No coverage | 0 |
| 1–2 articles, > 6 months old | 1 |
| 1–2 articles, < 6 months old | 2 |
| 3+ articles in last 6 months | 3 |
| TechCrunch / major press in last 3 months | 4 |
| Multiple major press + product launch in last 3 months | 5 |
Also flag:
product_hunt_featured: true/false — if Product Hunt coverage foundhacker_news_featured: true/false — if HN Show/Ask coverage found
Output
Write an array to data/normalized/company_news.json conforming to schemas/company_news.schema.json.
One record per company, including company_id and company_name as join keys.
Review checkpoint
After writing data/normalized/company_news.json, present a summary:
Found news coverage for [N] / [total] companies:
No coverage: [N] companies
Low momentum (1–2): [N] companies
Strong momentum (3+): [N] companies
Product Hunt featured: [N]
Hacker News featured: [N]
Top stories by recency:
| Company | Source | Date | Signal |
|---------|--------|------|--------|
| ... | TechCrunch | 2025-04-12 | product_launch |
...
Does this look right? You can:
- Confirm to proceed to step 5 (find latest fundraise)
- Add a news article manually: "add article for [company name]: [url]"
- Re-search a company: "re-search news for [company name]"
Do not proceed to find-latest-fundraise until the VC confirms.
