company-research

Company Research

Tool Selection (Critical)

Two Exa surfaces, two jobs:

• Exa Agent (agent_run) — the default for company research. Use it for deep dives, competitor analysis, multi-angle research (product + funding + news + people), and building company lists. One Agent run handles query decomposition, multi-step searching, and synthesis internally — do not orchestrate many manual searches for work an Agent run covers.
• web_search_advanced_exa — quick, low-latency lookups: a fast category: "company" discovery pass, a single news check, or finding a homepage.

Do NOT use other Exa tools.

Deep Dives and Lists: Exa Agent

Agent runs may stream to completion in one call. If a run outlives the MCP call window, continue waiting with its returned run ID.

1. Call agent_run with a natural-language query and, when you want repeatable structure, an outputSchema (bound arrays with maxItems).
2. If it returns status: "running" with a runId, call agent_run again with only that runId until outputReady is true.
3. Read output.text or output.structured, plus output.grounding citations, from the agent_run result.

Useful inputs: systemPrompt (source preferences, dedup rules), input.exclusion (companies to avoid), previousRunId (a new follow-up run based on a completed run), effort ("low" default; "auto" or "high" for more depth).

Example: company deep dive

agent_run {
  "query": "Research Anthropic: product lines, funding history and valuation, key executives, main competitors, and notable news from the last 6 months.",
  "effort": "auto",
  "outputSchema": {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
      "overview": { "type": "string" },
      "funding": { "type": "array", "maxItems": 10, "items": { "type": "object", "properties": { "round": { "type": "string" }, "amount": { "type": "string" }, "date": { "type": "string" } }, "required": ["round"] } },
      "competitors": { "type": "array", "maxItems": 10, "items": { "type": "string" } },
      "key_people": { "type": "array", "maxItems": 10, "items": { "type": "object", "properties": { "name": { "type": "string" }, "title": { "type": "string" } }, "required": ["name", "title"] } }
    },
    "required": ["overview", "competitors"]
  }
}