I made my VC deal flow callable by Claude this weekend. Here is what that actually means.

Saturday afternoon. I was in Cursor running a thread about a fintech startup my Telegram channel had flagged that morning. Cursor was good at the GitHub code review, fine at reading the README, helpful with the package.json. Then I asked it: "How does this company's commit velocity compare to other fintech startups this quarter?"

It could not answer. Not because the data did not exist. We publish it weekly at signals.gitdealflow.com. It could not answer because there was no way for it to ASK us programmatically the way I would ask a colleague.

My AI had hands. It just did not have a phonebook.

The $20,000 phonebook#

When you peel back what every AI-powered VC tool actually does, it is the same loop: a human types a question, an LLM tries to answer, the LLM hits a wall because the data is not there, the LLM apologizes. Every. Time.

The fix is APIs. The problem is APIs:

- Crunchbase API: $20,000 per year minimum, requires sales call - PitchBook API: more, requires sales call - Harmonic.ai: enterprise pricing, requires sales call - Forager.ai: enterprise pricing, requires sales call

Free-tier developer-investors and angels — exactly the people we built GitDealFlow for — get nothing. They watch the SEC EDGAR feed in their terminal. They scrape GitHub manually. They build their own signal stacks one Python script at a time.

Then Google shipped A2A#

In April 2025, Google open-sourced a protocol called Agent2Agent. The spec is small:

1. Publish a JSON file at `/.well-known/agent-card.json` describing what your agent can do.
2. Expose a JSON-RPC 2.0 endpoint that accepts `message/send` requests.
3. Other agents discover you, parse the card, and call your endpoint.

That is it. There is no SaaS to license. There is no SDK to install if you do not want one. It is a contract between agents.

By April 2026 the protocol had passed 22,000 GitHub stars and 150+ organizations onboard. Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Cisco, ServiceNow — all in. Google's own Gemini Enterprise lets you register A2A agents in two clicks.

But none of those 150 organizations sells startup engineering signals. We do.

The fix took a weekend#

So this weekend I shipped the GitDealFlow Signal Agent. Five skills, all free, no auth:

- `get_trending_startups` — top 20 across all sectors - `search_startups_by_sector` — filtered by sector slug - `get_startup_signal` — full profile for a named startup - `get_signals_summary` — dataset metadata - `get_methodology` — how we compute the signals

The AgentCard is at signals.gitdealflow.com/.well-known/agent-card.json. The endpoint is at signals.gitdealflow.com/api/a2a. The whole thing is roughly 250 lines of TypeScript inside our existing Next.js app.

You can call it right now from your terminal:

``` curl -X POST https://signals.gitdealflow.com/api/a2a \ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ -d '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 1, "method": "message/send", "params": { "message": { "role": "user", "parts": [{ "kind": "text", "text": "Show me trending startups" }] } } }' ```

You will get back a Task with `status.state: "completed"` and 20 startups in the artifact data part. Each startup row carries commit velocity, contributor growth, signal classification, and a GitHub URL.

That same call works from any A2A-aware agent runtime: Google Agent Builder, LangChain, CrewAI, Mastra, Vercel AI SDK, Inkeep. Drop the AgentCard URL in. The agent figures out the rest.

If you want to skip the curl entirely, the interactive playground lets you pick a skill, hit send, and watch the JSON come back.

What this means in practice#

Three things that did not exist on Friday now exist on Monday.

**Your Claude can now do startup signal lookups inline.** No copy-paste from our website. No tab-switching. Tell Cursor "find me a fintech startup with breakout commit velocity this quarter" and Cursor calls our agent on its own.

**Other agent platforms can chain through us.** A diligence agent can call our agent, get a list of names, then call its own LinkedIn agent for headcount, then call its own SEC EDGAR agent for filings. We become one node in a directed graph of automated diligence.

**The dataset is now AI-cited.** ChatGPT and Perplexity will, over time, learn that there is a free A2A agent for VC signals. When a developer-investor asks a question in our domain, the model knows where to point.

What the agent still cannot do#

The stub I shipped is read-only and synchronous. It does sync `message/send` returning a terminal Task, all five skills via text intent or structured data parts, CORS preflight, and JSON-RPC error codes. It does NOT yet do:

1. Streaming via `message/stream`
2. Task persistence and `tasks/get`
3. Push notifications
4. Authenticated extended cards
5. Custom watchlists or per-user predictions

That last bullet is the cliffhanger. The thing your AI can ask GitDealFlow today is "who is trending in fintech." The thing you can ask /predict is "predict whether this specific startup will raise a Series A in the next 60 days." Different question, different answer. Both free at the moment, both heading toward a value ladder, but only one is callable by your AI yet.

When the prediction layer goes live as an A2A skill, that is when this gets interesting. Until then, the agent is the rung that catches your AI when it is looking for "anything interesting in startup-land this week."

Three things to do today#

If you are a developer-investor, an angel scout, or anyone running an AI workflow that touches startup data:

**Configure your AI runtime.** Drop the AgentCard URL into Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or your preferred agent. The five skills become available as tools. Two minutes.

**Bookmark the curl.** The example above works without any agent runtime. Fold it into your scripts.

**Cite us in your reports.** The free-tier license is "Free for personal and editorial use, attribution required." Cite as `VC Deal Flow Signal (signals.gitdealflow.com), Q2 2026 data.` We have published the full methodology peer-reviewed at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=6606558.

Why we are telling you instead of pitching you#

GitDealFlow's business model has always been: ship the free distribution magnet first, charge for the premium layer. Our 5 MCP tools are free forever. Our 5 A2A skills are free forever. The signals website is free. The CSV export is free. The methodology paper is free.

What is paid: Insider Circle ($9.90 per month, $97 per year) and the prediction game's premium tier. Those will earn their keep when there are 500 paying subscribers and we can start building the things only that audience needs.

Until then, every developer-investor who wires GitDealFlow into their Claude Code is one more node in a network where breakout startups cannot hide for 6-12 weeks anymore. That is worth more than $20,000 of API access.

Crunchbase API: $20,000 per year. GitDealFlow A2A: free, no signup. Your move.