Someone asked me recently: "If people find the data valuable, why build an app? Just build an MCP."
It's a fair question. MCP is an open standard that lets an AI assistant call another service's tools and data, and Investi's data would work well behind one. My answer is about what we're building today, not a rule: what investors are missing most right now is a place where their research lives, so that's where our time goes. Some of this I'm still figuring out.
#What can the data do?
Start with what Investi has: the SEC record, every report US companies, funds and insiders have filed since 1993, cleaned up so an AI agent can search it, query it, read it and cite it. The analyst gets building blocks rather than a fixed menu of ready-made answers, so it can work out answers nobody has packaged.
Here's a question where that shows. Which companies changed auditors after their insiders sold stock? I couldn't find that list published anywhere, and the web-search assistants I tried found a couple of names at most. Investi's analyst joins the auditor-change 8-Ks to the insiders' Form 4s. Of the 394 companies that filed an auditor change (8-K Item 4.01) from January to September 2026, 68 had open-market sales by officers, directors or 10% owners in the 90 days before, and each one links to its 8-K.
An auditor change has plenty of ordinary causes, and many of those sales are planned trades, so the list is a reason to read the filings, not evidence of wrongdoing. You can check it yourself: run an EDGAR full-text search for "Item 4.01" in 8-Ks, then open each company's Form 4s for the three months before. Or ask Investi the question and open the citations.
So the question comes naturally. If the data is good, why not let people plug it into the agent they already use?
#Why isn't the data the product?
A data feed is a real business, and plenty of financial data companies run it well. You sell access, and whoever builds on top owns the user, the experience and the relationship. When a cheaper feed comes along, switching is a small change in their configuration.
That isn't the business Investi is in today. The data is how Investi gets there, not what it sells. What I'm after is the part a feed leaves to someone else: the place where you build conviction about what you own.
#Why isn't one good answer enough?
Putting money somewhere means building the conviction to do it. Professionals do that deliberately, with a process. Retail investors do it too, whether they realize it or not: a gut feeling, a post they read, a friend's tip, a chart that looked good. Either way it happens over weeks and months, and one answer doesn't carry it.
Professionals build that conviction on terminals that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year per seat and take training to use. Most individual investors have a broker app instead, often one that earns more when they trade more. Their information comes from friends, the news, forums, or, if they're serious, the filings themselves, which are long and dense.
Investi is meant to sit in that gap: the depth of a professional terminal, in a form anyone can use. That depth isn't one answer. Fundamental investing isn't set and forget. You keep checking on the business, your reasoning changes, and the thesis needs revisiting every quarter. That work needs somewhere to live.
#Why a workspace and not just a chat?
Coding agents give a useful comparison. They keep working files in a scratch folder and then forget them. What lasts is the project and its history. A chat with an agent connected to a data source works like the scratch folder: useful, then gone. Investi's workspace is meant to be the project. It holds your portfolio, your notes and theses, the companies you follow, and routines that rerun a question on a schedule and email you the result.
People also work differently. Some open the company, read the filing and ask one question after another. Others would rather be told when something matters. Investi is a workspace with an analyst in it, so you can do the work yourself, hand it off, or mix the two.
Two of the things that make an answer checkable are built into that workspace today. A citation opens the filing at the passage or table cell, so you read the number in context (How the analyst cites a filing shows how). When the analyst wants to change your notes, it shows the change and writes nothing until you approve it. Both work best when your research and the filings sit in one place you come back to.
#Where does MCP fit today?
Investi already uses MCP in one direction: you can connect a remote MCP server with OAuth, and the analyst uses its tools next to the filings.
Investi doesn't offer its own MCP server today. The most useful thing we can build right now is the place where your investing research lives, with the filings and their citations inside it.