Startup Funding Research Automation with Claude, Perplexity AI, and Airtable

How it works

This intelligent workflow automatically discovers and analyzes recently funded startups by:

Monitoring multiple news sources (TechCrunch and VentureBeat) for funding announcements
Using AI to extract key funding details (company name, amount raised, investors)
Conducting automated deep research on each company through perplexity deep research or jina deep search.
Organizing all findings into a structured Airtable database for easy access and analysis

Set up steps (10-15 minutes)

Connect your news feed sources (TechCrunch and VentureBeat). Could be extended. These were easy to scrape and this data can be expensive.
Set up your AI service credentials (Claude and Perplexity or jina which has generous free tier)
Connect your Airtable account and create a base with appropriate fields (can be imported from my base) or see structure below.
Airtable Base

Structure Funding Round Base

Field Name	Data Type	Description
website_url	String	URL of the company website
company_name	String	Name of the company
funding_round	String	The funding stage or round (e.g., Series A, Seed, etc.)
funding_amount	Number	The amount of funding received
lead_investor	String	The primary investor leading the funding round
market	String	The market or industry sector the company operates in
participating_investors	String	List of other investors participating in the funding round
press_release_url	String	URL to the press release about the funding
evaluation	Number	The company's valuation

Structure Company Deep Research Base

Field Name	Data Type	Description
website_url	String	URL of the company website
company_name	String	Name of the company
funding_round	String	The funding stage or round (e.g., Series A, Seed, etc.)
funding_amount	Number	The amount of funding received
currency	String	Currency of the funding amount
announcement_date	String	Date when the funding was announced
lead_investor	String	The primary investor leading the funding round
participating_investors	String	List of other investors participating in the funding round
industry	String	The industry sectors the company operates in
company_description	String	Description of the company's business
hq_location	String	Company headquarters location
founding_year	Number	Year the company was founded
founder_names	String	Names of the company founders
ceo_name	String	Name of the company CEO
employee_count	Number	Number of employees at the company
total_funding	Number	Total funding amount received to date
total_funding_currency	String	Currency of total funding
funding_purpose	String	Purpose or use of the funding
business_model	String	Company's business model
valuation	Object	Company valuation information
previous_rounds	Object	Information about previous funding rounds
source_urls	String	Source URLs for the funding information
original_report	String	Original report text about the funding
market	String	The market the company operates in
press_release_url	String	URL to the press release about the funding
evaluation	Number	The company's valuation

Notes

I found that by using perplexity via open router, we lose access to the sources, as they are not stored in the same location as the report itself so I opted to use perplexity API via HTTP node.

For using perplexity and or jina you have to configure header auth as described in Header Auth - n8n Docs

What you can learn

How to scrape data using sitemaps
How to extract strucutred data from unstructured text
How to execute parts of the workflow as subworkflow
How to use deep research in a practical scenario
How to define more complex JSON schemas

Startup Funding Research Automation with Claude, Perplexity AI, and Airtable

Tags

Getting Started

Startup Funding Research Automation with Claude, Perplexity AI, and Airtable

How it works

Set up steps (10-15 minutes)

Structure Funding Round Base

Structure Company Deep Research Base

Notes

What you can learn

Related Workflows

Community Questions Monitor with OpenRouter AI, Reddit & Forum Scraping

Automate Weekly Tech Research with Perplexity AI, Notion & Gmail

Convert Workout Plan PDFs to Hevy App Routines with Gemini AI