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

Description

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