AI Company Research Agent: Get Tech Stack, Executives & Competitors in 30 Seconds

#ai #automation #webscraping #api

The Problem: Manual Company Research

If you've ever tried to research companies for sales, investing, or competitive intel, you know the drill:

Want to find a company's tech stack? Dig through page source and job postings.
Need to identify the CEO? Search LinkedIn, Wikipedia, news articles.
Looking for competitors? Google around and hope for the best.

For each company, you're looking at 30-60 minutes of manual work. Multiply that by a list of 50 prospects and your week is gone.

The Solution: Automated Research Agent

I built AI Company Research Agent - an Apify actor that:

Takes a company name (just the name, nothing else)
Auto-discovers their website, social profiles, GitHub
Detects their tech stack (40+ technologies)
Finds key executives with titles
Identifies competitors
Pulls recent news with sentiment analysis
Optionally generates AI insights using GPT-4o-mini

All in about 30 seconds.

Basic Usage

{
  "companies": ["Stripe", "Figma", "Notion"],
  "researchDepth": "standard",
  "aiSynthesis": true,
  "openaiApiKey": "sk-..."
}

Output

{
  "companyName": "Stripe",
  "basicInfo": {
    "url": "https://stripe.com",
    "industry": "fintech",
    "socialLinks": {
      "linkedin": "https://linkedin.com/company/stripe",
      "twitter": "https://twitter.com/stripe"
    }
  },
  "techStack": {
    "technologies": ["React", "Next.js", "Cloudflare"],
    "categories": {
      "frontend": ["React", "Next.js"],
      "infrastructure": ["Cloudflare"]
    }
  },
  "employees": {
    "keyPeople": [
      {"name": "Patrick Collison", "title": "CEO", "confidence": "high"}
    ]
  },
  "competitors": {
    "direct": ["PayPal", "Adyen", "Square"]
  },
  "aiInsights": {
    "executiveSummary": "Stripe is a dominant payment infrastructure company...",
    "strengths": ["Developer-first approach", "Global reach"],
    "risks": ["Regulatory pressure", "Competition"]
  }
}

Use Cases

Sales Prospecting: Qualify leads and find decision makers before outreach
Investment Due Diligence: Research targets with AI-generated risk assessment
Competitive Intel: Benchmark tech stacks, track competitor news
Recruiting: Research companies before candidate conversations

Research Depth Options

Quick (5-10s, ~$0.25): High-volume lead screening
Standard (15-30s, ~$0.50): Balanced research for most use cases
Deep (45-60s, ~$1.50): Full due diligence with comprehensive data

Limitations (Being Honest)

Private companies: Limited data for stealth-mode startups
Employee counts: Estimates only, marked with confidence levels
No funding data: Removed in v2.0 (use Crunchbase API for that)
Rate limits: Some sources throttle; use residential proxies for bulk runs

Try It

The actor is live on Apify: AI Company Research Agent

Free tier available. Add your own OpenAI key for AI synthesis features.

Questions? Find me on X @CrawlingTheWeb or check out my other actors on Apify.

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