Funding announcements are high-signal and badly distributed. They break across tech press, company blogs, and newswires, then rot in archives. For an agent doing market research, competitive intel, or lead timing ("which startups just raised and might buy tooling?"), the raw web is too slow and too unstructured. We wanted a lookup an agent can call mid-task: ask about a company, get back a structured funding signal, pay five cents, move on. That's FreshSignal.
The dataset is 186 sourced 2026 funding announcements across 10 verticals, refreshed weekly. Every record is sourced — company, round, amount, vertical, announcement date — with links back to where it was reported. That sourcing discipline is the whole product: an agent (or its operator) can verify anything we return instead of trusting a black box. Stale data is the failure mode of every signal product, so the refresh cadence is part of the spec, not an afterthought.
Why per-call pricing on x402? Subscriptions make no sense for sporadic agent queries. An agent might check funding signals twice a month or two hundred times a day; a flat monthly seat punishes the first and undercharges the second. Per-call pricing at $0.05 USDC on Base via x402 matches cost to actual usage, and the 402 handshake means no account, no API key to leak into a prompt, no billing portal. The agent pays from its own wallet as part of the request. At five cents, the price is low enough that agents don't need to build caching strategies around it — the economic friction just disappears.
The flow is preview-first:
# 1. Query — free match preview first, so the agent sees what exists
GET /signal/funding?company=acme
→ 200 { match_preview: { ...redacted... }, payment_required: true }
# 2. Server returns 402 with terms: $0.05 USDC on Base (eip155:8453)
# 3. Agent pays, then submits proof
POST /fulfill-signal { "tx_hash": "0x..." }
→ 200 { company, round, amount, announced_date,
vertical, sources: [ ... ] }
GET /signal/funding/recent surfaces the latest announcements without needing a company name. There's also an MCP server with funding_lookup, funding_recent, and service_catalog tools for agents that live in MCP-first stacks.
What did we learn? Preview-first is the pattern that matters. Agents won't pay for a blind lookup — returning a redacted match preview before the 402 turns "pay us and find out" into "here's what we have, unlock the full record." We also learned that discovery files do real work: /.well-known/x402 and /llms.txt mean agents find and understand the endpoint without human intervention. And the boring lesson: dataset hygiene beats model cleverness. The value isn't in fancy extraction — it's in 186 announcements that are actually from 2026, actually in the right vertical, with working source links, refreshed every week. That discipline is unglamorous, and it's everything.
FreshSignal is built for agents and the operators who run them: machine-readable endpoints, five-cent calls, no accounts. Source and docs: https://github.com/tigerops-win/fresh-signal. If you're wiring funding signals into agent workflows, we'd genuinely like to hear what breaks — open an issue.
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