VC fund engineer builds a shared data layer for agents, finds Harmonic's throttled API the bottleneck
denedeh · reddit · 2026-10-05
An internal-tooling engineer at a VC fund describes building one data layer that all their agents read from and write back to, replacing per-person browsing across multiple UIs. Agents do research and enrichment; the layer is the substrate they query.
He wants two things from it: boring retrieval (finding companies and people matching a brief), and the harder half — having agents internalize the firm's growth heuristics (e.g., headcount trends plus a new CXO hire as a leading indicator) and flag matches across the portfolio weekly.
Current provider Harmonic, the default at most VCs he knows, is the bottleneck on both halves: the API is throttled so pushing 100 records requires batching and babysitting, and the fixed filter set (geography, title, mutual connections) can't support leading indicators or backtesting on historical snapshots. He asks what others run underneath agents and whether provider APIs survive agent-grade call volumes.
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