Fireround Finds the Rounds Again, and Claude Defaults to Opus 5.5

Why Care?

Fireround is how Perplexed puts verified funding rounds into a company note. Days after we shipped it, it went quiet: runs finished without errors, and the ## Fundraising History section stayed empty, even for companies that obviously had raised money.

The account was fine. We were asking the wrong question.

What's New?

• Rounds arrive again. Perplexed now asks Fireround for a company's rounds by its exact domain, so a note on firecrawl.dev finds Firecrawl's rounds whether or not its description mentions the domain.

• Claude is current. The default model is Claude Opus 5.5, and the list offers Fable 5.1, Sonnet 5.5, Haiku 5.5, and Opus 4.8. Existing settings keep the model you chose.

What Went Wrong

We were calling Fireround's rounds/search with the domain as its query. That query is free-text search over company names, descriptions, and investors. It only found companies whose domain appeared somewhere in that text, and for most companies it doesn't, so most notes got nothing back.

Fireround has a capability built for exactly our case, companies/rounds, which takes a domain and matches it exactly:

{ "provider": "fireround", "capability": "companies/rounds",
  "options": { "company": "firecrawl.dev", "limit": 20 } }

We kept the check that drops any round whose company domain differs from the note's, so a fuzzy match on Fireround's side can never put another company's rounds in your note.

Good to Know

• Fireround doesn't cover everyone. Very small, very new, or long-acquired companies may still return no rounds. A notice says so and the run carries on.

• On the 5.x Claude models, thinking is always on, and the effort setting controls how much. The thinking toggle now only changes Opus 4.8.