Open · v0.1.0 · live
The open data layer for machine-readable companies.
Companies and individuals publish a single, well-versioned profile at a known location on their own domain. Agents, investors, and search systems discover it without scraping, login walls, or paying a data broker. The publisher stays the source of truth — for everything, from the public-facing pitch all the way through to the figures behind NDA.
Why we're doing this
Three things are happening at once, and the existing standards stack doesn't meet any of them.
Agents have become the reader
LLM-driven agents now do the first pass on every diligence query, RFP, sourcing list, and supplier check. They need machine-readable answers, not HTML.
The web has no company layer
Schema.org describes content. OpenGraph describes social previews. XBRL covers regulated financial filings for listed firms only. There's no open standard for "who is this company, and what do they want a serious reader to know."
Brokers own the data we publish about ourselves
PitchBook, Crunchbase, Pitchly, and others assemble company profiles by scraping and licensing — then sell them back to investors at five-figure annual seats. The company being described doesn't control any of it.
Why companies should take control
Today, the canonical "company profile" most agents and investors read is whichever broker they happen to subscribe to. That broker decides what's correct, what's missing, what's stale, and who can see it. The company has no edit access, no canonical URL, and no way to mark a claim as evidenced versus assumed.
The right place to publish data about your company is your own website. That's true of your prices, your team, your case studies, and your blog — and it should be just as true of your jurisdiction, your registry IDs, your stage, your headcount band, your fundraise window, and the contact channel you actually want agents to use. agentic-first is the contract that lets you do that, in a shape an agent or a directory can read without negotiating with you.
| Question | Today | With agentic-first |
|---|---|---|
| Who's the source of truth on your company? | A data broker that bought your details from somewhere | You are, at /.well-known/agentic-profile.json |
| How does an investor agent reach the right person? | LinkedIn DM, scraped email, contact form lottery | The channel you nominated in contact.preferred_channel |
| Where do diligence-grade figures live? | Spreadsheet in a data room, gated by manual NDA | Your own protected MCP, OAuth-scoped per section, audited |
| Who pays to discover you? | The investor (broker subscription) | Nobody — discovery is open and free at the point of use |
| How is "verified" defined? | Whatever the broker decides, opaque | Statutory IDs (Companies House, GLEIF, EDGAR) the directory checks publicly |
What this actually is
Three ways to describe it, depending on who you're talking to:
- For developers: an open, developer-first extension layer for company and personal data on the agent web — JSON Schema 2020-12, well-known URI, MIT-friendly Apache-2.0 license.
- For investors and operators: the company-controlled alternative to PitchBook-style data brokers. Public discovery is free; protected diligence detail stays on the company's own private MCP.
- For the agent ecosystem: the API layer for machine-readable companies. The slot Schema.org never filled and OpenAPI was never meant to occupy.
The standard itself has two tiers. The public tier is a small, opinionated profile every company or individual hosts themselves; banded metrics keep it clear of UK FCA financial-promotion rules so it can stay open. The protected tier is the same shape but carries precise figures, named logos, fundraise detail, calendars, and references — served from your own MCP, behind your own auth. agentic-first publishes the schema for both; the controls on the protected tier are yours.
Who it's for
Founders & IR leads
Take canonical control of how your company appears to agents and investors. Five fields and a JSON file gets you indexed; a private MCP later gets you a deal-grade surface, on your terms.
NEDs, advisors, fractionals
Publish a personal profile in the same shape — current roles, banded past-roles count, credentials, evidence — at /.well-known/agentic-profile.json on your own site. Discoverable without LinkedIn.
Investors & operators
Filter the open directory by jurisdiction, stage, funding band, headcount band, score. Every result links back to the publisher's source URL — no scraping, no broker tax.
Agent & tool builders
One Streamable HTTP MCP, six tools, no auth required for read. search_companies, get_company, queue_scan — drop it into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or your own LangChain setup.
What we're being honest about
A standard isn't a standard until people use it. The four hard problems any contender in this space has to answer, and where we currently sit on each:
| Problem | How agentic-first answers it today |
|---|---|
| Trust. An agent that trusts a JSON file you wrote about yourself isn't doing diligence. | Statutory ID anchors (Companies House registry IDs, GLEIF LEIs) verified by the directory; per-claim evidence URLs; banded metrics on the public tier; protected detail behind your own audited auth. Verifiable Credentials and provenance signing are on the v0.2 roadmap. |
| Adoption. Standards die without a first 50 publishers. | Lowest-bar by design: a single static JSON file, no server, no SDK. Hand-onboarding the first 50 from existing networks; one accelerator partnership planned for batch publishing of a portfolio. |
| Maintenance. Profiles go stale the moment they're published. | Re-validation is the directory's job, not the publisher's. Stale-flagging on the public surface; updates append-only stream on the protected tier so investors get notified without you sending another email. |
| Incentive. Why would a company bother? | Because agents are now the first reader on every inbound RFP, sourcing brief, and investor screen. If you don't publish your own profile, somebody else's broker entry is the answer. |
The directory MCP is already live
Point any MCP-aware client at
https://directory.agentic-first.co/mcp to search,
retrieve, and submit profiles. Schemas live at
https://directory.agentic-first.co/schemas/. Liveness
and version on
https://directory.agentic-first.co/healthz. No auth
for read; rate-limited and SSRF-guarded for write.