CB Insights

Research private companies, deals and investors.

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What the CB Insights connector does

The CB Insights MCP server connects private-market research — company profiles, funding, deals, investors and people — to Claude, ChatGPT and any MCP-compatible agent. CB Insights documents 40 tools, of which nine write and two delete. Anthropic's directory lists 15, all reads. Sign-in is OAuth, and every call is metered.

Verified connector

Listed by Anthropic as a partner connector in its Connectors Directory.

Connection checked by Agentman on .

Anthropic states this reflects the level of review a connector received, not a security audit.

CB Insights tools (40)

  • api_chatcbi
  • api_rag
  • company_advanced_search
  • get_company_acquisitions
  • get_company_competitors
  • get_company_exits
  • get_company_funding
  • get_company_investments
  • get_company_investors
  • get_company_markets
  • get_company_news
  • get_company_outlook
  • get_company_profile
  • get_company_relationships
  • get_company_revenue

Tool names from Anthropic's directory listing. This server requires sign-in, so we could not read tool descriptions or parameter schemas.

Limits

  • Anthropic's directory listing is not a safety summary here. It lists 15 tools, all reads, and omits all nine writes, both deletes, all six search tools and the usage-accounting tool. Any assessment built on the listing alone will conclude this is a pure read connector, which it is not. Anthropic's own record does flag the connector's permissions as "Read and write", which contradicts its own tool list.
  • Three listed tools could not be found in CB Insights' documentation — api_chatcbi, api_rag and company_advanced_search. We believe they are stale entries from the self-hosted server CB Insights deprecated in January 2026, but that is inference and CB Insights does not say so.
  • The OAuth scopes are no boundary. The resource descriptor and authorization server both advertise exactly openid, email and profile — all identity claims. Nothing at the consent screen separates reading a company profile from deleting a shared watchlist. Entitlement happens inside CB Insights' own per-seat licensing, not at the grant.
  • Deleting a watchlist you own deletes it for everyone it was shared with. There is no documented undo, and no confirmation step inside the tool beyond requiring a numeric id.
  • Calls are metered and can be rejected. Overages bill at $0.05 per call and unused annual allowance expires without rollover. get_usage is the only way to check consumption, and no documented idempotency key protects a retried write from duplicating.
  • We could not read tool schemas or safety annotations. The endpoint returned 401 to an anonymous request, so no readOnlyHint or destructiveHint is published here. Parameter detail on this page comes from CB Insights' documentation, not from the server.
  • CB Insights blocks AI crawlers from the same data this connector serves. Its robots.txt disallows ClaudeBot, GPTBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended from /research/, /company/, /investor/, /esp/ and /compare/. That is not a contradiction — it is the unlicensed channel being closed while the licensed, metered one stays open — but it does mean an agent must go through the paid connector, and the terms separately prohibit scraping the Services.
  • The developer portal is robots-excluded and we did not fetch it. api-docs.cbinsights.com/robots.txt is a blanket Disallow: /, and that host is not the documentation URL Anthropic's directory nominates, so it fell outside what we were willing to retrieve. Everything on this page comes from the MCP host's own docs-portal.md, CB Insights' public legal pages, or the directory.
  • Transcript content carries extra restrictions. CB Insights' Additional Terms require buyer and investor transcript insights be used for internal business activities and not attributed to a transcript participant, with earnings transcripts carved out. An agent that quotes a buyer interview into a client-facing deliverable may breach that independently of anything technical.
  • RAG and embeddings are unaddressed by the licence. No clause permits or prohibits either over CB Insights' own data. Treat it as unresolved rather than as permission.
  • ChatCBI is metered separately at 150 messages per authorised user per month, enforced annually, with CB Insights reserving the right to suspend access above 120% of the annual limit. That is a platform feature rather than a documented MCP tool, but it shares the subscription.

Frequently asked questions

How many tools does the CB Insights MCP server actually have?

Forty, not the fifteen Anthropic's directory lists. CB Insights publishes its own tool reference at mcp.cbinsights.com/docs-portal.md, retrieved 2026-08-23, which states 40 tools across three categories. Twelve of the directory's fifteen names match it, three do not appear at all, and twenty-eight documented tools are missing from the listing.

Can the CB Insights connector delete anything?

Yes, two tools delete. CB Insights documents delete_watchlist and delete_watchlist_column, neither of which appears in Anthropic's directory listing. Deleting a watchlist you own removes it for everyone it was shared with, which CB Insights reports in a removed_for field. Removing organisations from a watchlist is a soft delete instead.

Is the CB Insights MCP server read-only?

No. Nine of the forty documented tools write, covering watchlist creation, renaming, column changes, cell values and two deletes. Every one of those nine is absent from Anthropic's directory listing, whose fifteen names are all reads. Anthropic separately records the connector's permissions as Read and write, which corroborates the documentation.

Does a CB Insights MCP call cost money?

Every tool call is metered, and overages are billed. CB Insights' Additional Terms state it may charge overages at the rate of $0.05 per tool call, quarterly in arrears. Elite+ seats get 10,000 annual calls per contracted user plus 200 per day per user; standalone MCP packages run from 250,000 to 5.2 million calls annually.

Can an agent check how many CB Insights tool calls it has left?

Yes, through get_usage, but Anthropic's directory does not list that tool. CB Insights documents it as reporting calls made and calls the plan allows, returning a daily per-user figure and an annual team figure. An agent built from the directory listing alone would have no way to check spend before exhausting the allowance.

Do CB Insights' terms allow feeding its data into Claude or ChatGPT?

Yes, expressly, within conditions. CB Insights' Additional Terms permit customers to use Licensed Materials with third-party LLMs, naming OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, for internal business purposes inside a secure enterprise-controlled environment. Training, fine-tuning or teaching any large language model on the data remains prohibited, as does generating substitute content.

Does an AI agent count as a licensed CB Insights user?

Yes. CB Insights defines a User as any person or AI Agent authorised to act on the customer's behalf, and defines an AI Agent as any automated process accessing the data programmatically, irrespective of whether a human initiates each individual request. Agent access is therefore seat-consuming rather than free, and subject to compliance audits.

What personal data can the CB Insights connector read?

Named individuals with contact details. CB Insights documents search_people as finding executives, founders and engineers, filterable by contact availability meaning email or LinkedIn, and returning each person's profile URL, location, contact info and role history. That tool is absent from Anthropic's directory listing, so the listing understates the personal-data surface.

Why does the CB Insights documentation URL show nothing in a browser?

Because Anthropic's directory nominates the MCP endpoint itself as the documentation URL. A GET to mcp.cbinsights.com returns HTTP 405 Method Not Allowed, since the host serves the protocol rather than a page. The real tool reference sits at the docs-portal.md path on that same host and returns Markdown.

Sources

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