Cursor + GitDealFlow: Inline Deal-Flow Lookup During Code Review (2-Minute MCP Recipe)

You're reviewing a fintech repo at 11pm. It's a Tuesday. You're a developer-investor — most of the cap table you own is from Twitter DMs and the "are you raising?" question, and you do diligence the same way you debug: you open the repo in Cursor and start reading.

You're three commits deep into a small-team payments-rails infrastructure repo. Something feels off. The commit graph went from 4 commits per week in February to 32 commits per week starting late March. New contributors. New CI workflows. A whole new package directory.

You ask Cursor: "is this commit pattern unusual?"

Cursor's AI calls a tool. The tool replies: out of 4,200 tracked startups, this team is in the top 6% by 14-day commit-velocity acceleration. Their language mix shifted from 78% TypeScript to 51% TypeScript / 32% Rust over the last 30 days. There are 4 newly-active contributors with FAANG-tagged GitHub histories. The closest matched cohort raised a Series A within 6-8 weeks of a similar pattern.

You hit reply on the founder's email. "Quick call this week?"

That whole loop — from "feels off" to "send the email" — took 90 seconds. The 4-line config that made it work is below. Two minutes to install. Free forever. No card.

The 2-minute install#

Two paths. Pick one. Both end in the same place.

### Path A — Cursor's UI (recommended for first-time MCP users)

Open Cursor. Go to Settings → MCP → Add new server. Fill in three fields:

``` Name: GitDealFlow Command: npx Args: @gitdealflow/mcp-signal@latest ```

Hit Save. Cursor will spin up the server on first use. You're done.

### Path B — Edit ~/.cursor/mcp.json directly

If you already manage MCP servers via JSON (Claude Code-style), drop this into ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

```json { "mcpServers": { "gitdealflow": { "command": "npx", "args": ["@gitdealflow/mcp-signal@latest"] } } } ```

Restart Cursor (Cmd-Q, reopen). The MCP panel under Settings will now show GitDealFlow with a green dot.

The npx command pulls @gitdealflow/mcp-signal from npm and runs it on stdio. The package is open-source, read-only, no auth, no destructive ops. It exposes 5 skills: get_trending_startups, search_startups_by_sector, get_startup_signal, get_signals_summary, and get_methodology. The data behind those skills is the same panel that backs the SSRN preprint and the Kaggle dataset — 4,200 tracked startup GitHub orgs, weekly refresh, public methodology.

The working recipe#

Once the green dot is on, here are 5 prompts to paste the moment install completes. Each one is a real query you can run in Cursor's chat or Composer with no additional setup.

1. Open file → ambient context. Open any package.json or Cargo.toml and ask: "What's the GitHub org for this project, and is it tracked by GitDealFlow? If yes, what's its current acceleration score?"

1. Sector pulse from the editor. With any file open: "Show me the top 10 trending fintech startups this week. Format as a table: name, GitHub org, 14-day commit-velocity %, acceleration tier."

1. Pattern check during review. While reading a commit graph or contributor list: "Is this team's commit cadence unusual relative to similar-stage startups? Compare against the get_trending_startups output."

1. Citation for a deal memo. If you're drafting an investor memo in markdown: "Get the methodology citation string for GitDealFlow's engineering acceleration metric. Include the SSRN abstract URL and the dataset DOI."

1. Repo-as-context lookup. Right after git clone <something-interesting>: "What signal does GitDealFlow have on this org? If it's not tracked, suggest the closest matched startup in the same sector."

The prompts are lever-bait. Once you've run any one of them, you'll wire your own.

Real use case: catching a breakout during a 30-minute review#

Imagine Halcyon Pay — a four-person fintech building cross-border payment rails on top of a Solana-adjacent stack. The founder DMs you on Twitter: "we're not raising, but happy to talk if you want to learn what we're building." You agree to a Friday call. It's Wednesday at 11pm and you decide to do 30 minutes of homework first.

You clone the repo. You open cargo.toml in Cursor.

You ask: "What's the engineering acceleration of this org?" Cursor invokes get_startup_signal with the org name. The MCP server answers in 1.4 seconds: 14-day commit velocity is up +187% over the prior window. Three new contributors joined in the last 21 days. Two of them have prior commits to repos at well-known fintech infrastructure companies. Language mix has tilted toward Rust, which on our panel correlates with the post-prototype, pre-Series A scaling sprint signature.

You ask the next question: "Compare Halcyon Pay against trending fintech this week. Where do they rank?" Cursor calls search_startups_by_sector with sector=fintech. Halcyon Pay is at rank 3 by acceleration score this week. Above two YC-backed teams the founder has explicitly mentioned as "people we look up to" on Twitter.

You ask the last question: "What's the median lead time between an acceleration spike like this and a public fundraise announcement, on your panel?" Cursor calls get_methodology. Answer: 3 to 6 weeks median, with 12% of breakout signals not converting within 12 weeks. SSRN preprint cited.

Now you have the call agenda. You're not going in blind asking "tell me about the company." You're going in saying "your repo went +187% in three weeks; what changed?" Founders love this question. It signals you did the work. It also lets them tell you about the round they're not-quite-yet raising — because by week 6 of a +187% spike, something is being prepared.

Crunchbase will list Halcyon Pay's seed extension in 47 days. You're having the conversation tonight.

What you can ask#

``` 1. "Who's trending in fintech this week? Show top 10 by acceleration." 2. "Show me developer-tools startups with breakout signals in the last 14 days." 3. "Tell me about Roboflow — engineering acceleration, contributor mix, sector rank." 4. "Compare commit velocity between Modular and Mojo over the last 30 days." 5. "I just cloned <github.com/some-org>. Is it tracked? What's the signal?" 6. "What does engineering acceleration actually measure? Cite the methodology." 7. "Give me the 5 fastest-accelerating ai-ml startups under 10 contributors." 8. "Refresh — show me this week's full top 20 with sector breakdown." ```

A note on caching: Cursor caches MCP tool output between calls inside the same conversation. If you want the latest weekly data after Monday's refresh, ask "refresh and re-run" — or start a new chat. The panel updates Sunday 23:59 UTC.

Methodology and citation#

This recipe runs on the same data behind the SSRN preprint (ssrn.com/abstract=6606558) and the Kaggle dataset (CC-BY-4.0). The methodology is public and reproducible — full pipeline at signals.gitdealflow.com/methodology.

The MCP server is free forever. The 5 skills above will never gate behind a paywall — that's a written commitment. The free Sunday digest at signals.gitdealflow.com shows you 5 breakout startups every week, 3 weeks before TechCrunch picks them up. No card.

If you want to compete with Crunchbase's 47-day lag, the answer is not faster Crunchbase. The answer is reading the repo. This recipe puts that lens inside the editor where you already spend the day.

— The Data Nerd