platform · deal sourcing software

deal sourcing software, built for the pre-round

Q: what is the best deal sourcing software for early-stage vcs?

for pre-seed and seed, the differentiator is earliness. frontrun flags companies from pre-round investor behavior, months before they hit crunchbase or pitchbook, at $99/mo. for full market coverage, pair it with a retrospective database.

Q: how much does deal sourcing software cost?

coverage databases like pitchbook and harmonic are typically enterprise-priced ($20k-$40k/yr). frontrun is one plan at $99/mo with a 7-day free trial and includes api + mcp access.

Q: can deal sourcing software plug into ai agents?

frontrun does - it ships an mcp server (npx frontrun-mcp-server --setup, 29 tools) and a rest api, so a claude code or cursor agent can run discovery and outreach directly.

deal sourcing software is how modern investors find and qualify companies to back. the problem: almost all of it is retrospective - it shows you rounds that already happened or companies already visible to the web. frontrun is the layer upstream of that.

what is deal sourcing software?

deal sourcing software is any tool that helps a venture investor find, track, and qualify companies to invest in. the category splits three ways: databases of announced rounds (pitchbook, crunchbase), company-formation and web-presence indexes (harmonic), and pre-round behavioral signal (frontrun). the first two tell you a company exists once it's already visible. the third tells you where capital is about to move, before the raise.

why most deal sourcing software is late

if a tool sources from press releases, filings, or web scraping, it can only surface a company after it's already discoverable - which means every other fund's software surfaces it at the same time. by the time a startup is in a database, the pre-seed is usually closed and the allocation is spoken for. the edge isn't better coverage of what's already public. it's seeing the signal before it's public.

how frontrun sources deals differently

frontrun watches what 1,000+ venture investors do on x - specifically who they start following. when several tracked investors converge on the same young account, that's a pre-round signal, often at double-digit follower counts and months before any announcement. it's behavioral, not retrospective, so it can't be backfilled by a competitor scraping the same public web.

	retrospective databases	frontrun
Signal	announced rounds, filings, web presence	investor follow-graph convergence (pre-round)
Timing	after a company is public	before the raise, often at <100 followers
Price	enterprise, $20k-$40k/yr typical	$99/mo, 7-day trial
Agent access	api (enterprise tiers)	api + mcp server (npx), one command

which is right for you

if you need full market maps

buy a coverage database (pitchbook, harmonic) for record-keeping and totality. pair it with frontrun for earliness - many funds run both.

if you source pre-seed and seed

prioritize earliness over coverage. frontrun is built for finding companies before they're in any database.

if your team runs agents

make sure the tool has real agent access. frontrun ships an mcp server and rest api so your agent can source, enrich, and draft outreach in one workflow.

the receipts

frontrun's flags carry dated provenance, so "we saw it early" is checkable per company:

@techdollarhq - flagged at 13 followers, $3M pre-seed 123 days later
@orthogonal_sh - flagged 184 days before a $4.3M round led by Pantera
@rialto_xyz - flagged at 18 followers, 26 days before its Robinhood partner announcement

frequently asked

what is the best deal sourcing software for early-stage vcs?

for pre-seed and seed, the differentiator is earliness. frontrun flags companies from pre-round investor behavior, months before they hit crunchbase or pitchbook, at $99/mo. for full market coverage, pair it with a retrospective database.

how much does deal sourcing software cost?

coverage databases like pitchbook and harmonic are typically enterprise-priced ($20k-$40k/yr). frontrun is one plan at $99/mo with a 7-day free trial and includes api + mcp access.

can deal sourcing software plug into ai agents?

frontrun does - it ships an mcp server (npx frontrun-mcp-server --setup, 29 tools) and a rest api, so a claude code or cursor agent can run discovery and outreach directly.

see the signal before the round

7-day free trial · $99/mo · API + MCP for agents

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