One URL In, a Company Dossier Out
You're about to take a meeting, write a sales email, or evaluate a competitor, and you need to know who you're dealing with. Not in an hour—right now. Usually that means ten browser tabs, a handful of half-decent guesses, and a lot of scrolling through pages that may or may not be current. Company Researcher takes a different approach: you give it a company's URL, and it pulls together what's out there—website content, LinkedIn presence, funding details, and news coverage—into a single pass.
What It Does
Company Researcher is a free, open-source tool that gathers information about a company from across the web when you provide its URL. It's built on Exa.ai, which the project describes as a search engine for AI applications. Every piece of data it collects comes through Exa's search API rather than through a pile of custom scrapers you'd have to maintain yourself.
The tool organizes its lookups into a few buckets:
- Website information—the company's site content, plus subpages like About, FAQs, Pricing, and Blog.
- LinkedIn data—the company profile and founders' profiles.
- Financial information—funding details, plus profiles on Crunchbase, PitchBook, and Tracxn, and 10-K financial reports where they exist.
- Market intelligence—news coverage.
Each of these maps to a specific Exa API call, and the README links every one of them directly to Exa's playground so you can try the query yourself before you touch any code.
Why It's Cool
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The README doubles as a tutorial. This is the part I appreciate most. Instead of just telling you what the tool fetches, it gives you a direct playground link for every single data source—website contents, the LinkedIn profile search, the funding query, the Crunchbase and PitchBook lookups, the 10-K reports. You can see exactly what each API call does and what it returns before you commit to building anything. That's a rare level of transparency in a project README.
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The search queries are smarter than a keyword dump. Take the funding query. It doesn't just search for "company funding" and hand you whatever comes back. It asks a summary model to "tell me all about the funding (and if available, the valuation) of this company in detail," and instructs it to reply with a single word—"NO"—if there's no funding info. That's a small design decision with a real payoff: you get a clean signal instead of a page of noise you have to sift through.
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It reaches the sources you'd check anyway. Crunchbase, PitchBook, Tracxn, 10-K filings, LinkedIn—these are the places you'd end up during manual research. The project wires them up with domain filters so the results stay on target, which is the tedious part of doing this by hand.
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Live crawling where it counts. Several of the queries use live crawling—the funding lookup, the news search, the 10-K search, and the subpage search all specify it. For information that changes fast, that matters.
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It's honest about its scope. The README carries a note that the repository is out of scope for Exa's vulnerability disclosure program and that reports against it aren't eligible for bounty rewards. That's not a feature, but it's a useful bit of honesty about what this code is—a demo and a utility, not hardened production infrastructure you should point at anything sensitive.
How to Try It
Start with the repository: github.com/exa-labs/company-researcher.
The README doesn't spell out install commands, so the fastest path to understanding the tool is the playground links it provides. Pick a company you know well—say, one you've worked at—and run a couple of the queries against it. You'll quickly see what the tool can and can't find.
From there:
- Clone the repo and read through how the API calls are structured.
- You'll need access to Exa's API, since every lookup routes through it. The playground links show you the request shapes.
- Adapt the queries to your own use case—swap the subpage targets, change the domains you filter on, or add a section for something the defaults don't cover.
Because each data source is a discrete, documented API call, you can lift one piece without adopting the whole thing. If all you want is funding summaries, you can take that query and leave the rest.
Final Thoughts
Company Researcher is best understood as a well-documented starting point rather than a finished product. If you're building anything that needs company intelligence—a sales tool, a research assistant, a due-diligence helper—the value here is the query design and the direct playground links that let you validate each piece before you build on it. It won't replace a careful analyst, and the README's own scoping note tells you not to treat it as production-grade. But for developers who want to see how far a search API can take company research, it's a practical, honest place to start.
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