perplexed 0.5.0 Published

Perplexed 0.5.0 — verified funding rounds, written into your notes

Perplexed 0.5.0 adds Fireround beside Exa, so a company profile carries real funding data verbatim and every round can be cited.

All ship notes

Perplexed brings source-cited research from Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Perplexica / Vane, and LM Studio into your notes. 0.5.0 gives company profiles verified funding data: the raw rounds land under your heading exactly as they arrived, and every round can be cited.

Why care?

Funding is where a research model is most likely to be confidently wrong. Round sizes get rounded, lead investors get swapped, and a company with a similar name slips into the table. It looks right either way, so you only find out if you check.

Fireround is a feed of startup funding rounds checked against their sources. 0.5.0 lets a directory template start from it, so a company profile's funding section begins with data rather than a model's reading of search results.

What's new?

  • Raw funding data under your heading. Add write-json-under: "Fundraising History" and Perplexed writes the rounds into that section as a json code fence. The plugin writes it, not the model, so the numbers can't be reworded. Running the template again replaces the block instead of adding a second one.

  • A citation for every round. Each round reaches the writing model as its own [^F1] source, with its amount, date, investors, and announcement link, so each row of a funding table can carry a citation.

  • Beside Exa, not instead of it. Both run before the model writes, and each keeps its own citation markers.

  • Your Firecrawl key stays out of your plugin files. Fireround runs through Firecrawl, and the key lives in Obsidian's keychain. Other plugins can share the same secret.

YAML
include-sources:
  - provider: fireround
    write-json-under: "Fundraising History"
  - provider: exa
    query: "{{basename}} {{url}} overview product funding customers"

It stays out of the way when it should

  • Only exact matches count. Rounds are kept only when the company's domain equals the note's, so a similarly named company never gets in.

  • Only homepages are looked up. A note on openai.com/sora is about something hosted on that domain, and the host's rounds aren't its rounds. Fireround is skipped, and a notice says why.

  • Nothing stops a run. With no rounds, no key, or a failed call, Exa and the model carry on, and a notice says what happened.

Upgrade notes

Your settings and hotkeys carry over. To turn Fireround on:

  1. Under Settings → Perplexed → Firecrawl, create or link a secret holding your Firecrawl key.

  2. Add the fireround entry above to a template's include-sources:. Perplexed doesn't overwrite templates already in your vault, so an existing toolkit-profile.md needs this by hand. A newly seeded copy has the entry ready to uncomment.

One behaviour change: "Use Exa retrieval" now governs Exa only. In the run dialog, the toggle is now called "Retrieve sources first" and covers every provider a template declares, and it's no longer greyed out when Exa is off.

Each Fireround lookup uses Firecrawl credits (5 on our test calls).

Under the hood

  • fireroundService.ts: a thin client over Firecrawl's /v2/scrape with an alexandria body, using requestUrl as Exa's client does. It surfaces errors reported inside a 200.

  • include-sources: gains a second provider through the existing SourceSpec union, and ResolveOutcome.jsonBlocks carries raw data outside the context budget, since it never enters the prompt.

  • insertJsonUnderHeading() skips headings inside code blocks, replaces an existing fence rather than stacking, adds the heading if the model dropped it, and lengthens the fence if fetched text contains one.

  • A round known only from a later round's previous_rounds still gets its own source.

  • 18 new node:test specs (42 total). Lint is clean.

Compatibility

minAppVersion: 1.13.0, unchanged. Desktop only, unchanged. No new dependencies. New network destination, only when a template asks for it and a key is set: api.firecrawl.dev.

Engineering changelog