Changelog #4: Sources, Agent Outboxes, and API Access — From Discovery to Acquisition

Last quarter, we put discovery on autopilot. The Information Frontier Agent, Source Streams, APAC search, and workspaces shipped in quick succession, and the result was immediate: your agents surfaced over 10,000 new data sources worldwide, and the success stories keep coming in.

But discovery was never the whole job. Finding a vendor and acquiring a sample are different problems — and until now, Brickroad only solved the first one. The moment your agent surfaced a promising supplier, the workflow fell off a cliff: into spreadsheets, cold emails from your corporate address, and threads that broadcast your thesis to anyone paying attention.

Today we're shipping the other half of the sourcing marathon:

• Sources — a system of record for everything your agents find
• Agent Outboxes — an agent mailbox for approval-gated outreach and sample collection
• API access — our first public API, so discovery can live in your workflow instead of ours

Everything below is live today. You can go from thesis to catalog to sample request without leaving Brickroad.

Sources: a system of record for the frontier

The Sources tab is your organization's living catalog of data suppliers. Every company your Information Frontier Agent surfaces — across every query, every Stream, every workspace — lives in this one place. Sort by novelty, ticker, geography, contactability, or by plain old keyword.

Discovery output used to be scoped to the run that produced it. Run a query, get a table, export it, repeat. That model breaks the moment your organization runs discovery continuously: results pile up in run-shaped silos, and nobody holds the aggregate picture. Sources is that aggregate picture.

What you can do in it:

• Filter by contact level, feasibility, query, region, sector, or minimum novelty — slice the catalog down to exactly the frontier you care about
• Switch between a spatial Mesh and a dense Grid, and save any slice as a Subnet to share across your workspace or pod
• Streaming queries now diff against prior runs, so you see what's new instead of rediscovering incumbents

That last one deserves a beat. A Source Stream that re-surfaces the same fifty suppliers every week is a noise machine. Diffing against prior runs means the stream feed is now a delta feed: only suppliers your organization has not seen before. The signal-to-noise ratio of continuous discovery just went up an order of magnitude.

Want to integrate your existing catalog into Sources, or vice versa? Reach out.

Agent Outboxes: approval-gated outreach

Finding a vendor and acquiring a sample are different problems. We're well on our way to solving the first. The Agent Outbox handles the second.

When you request a sample from a supplier in Sources, your agent takes it from there:

• Your agent conducts the outreach, sequences follow-ups, and collects samples from its own mailbox. No more copying supplier contacts into your CRM, no more forgetting to nudge a vendor who went quiet, no more samples buried in a personal inbox.
• Every send is human-gated. Nothing goes out until you edit, approve, or reject it. The agent drafts; you decide. This is not a spam cannon — it is a first-touch machine with a human on the trigger.
• All communication is pseudonymous. You can now automate the first touch without broadcasting your thesis to the market. The supplier sees a legitimate, responsive counterparty; they do not see which fund, lab, or corporate is behind the inquiry until you choose to reveal it.

That last property matters more than it might seem. For most of our clients, what you are sourcing is itself the secret. A cold email from your corporate domain asking about niche shipping-lane telemetry tells the market exactly what you are building. Pseudonymous agent outreach separates the act of sourcing from the identity of the sourcer — which means you can move earlier, and wider, than you could when every inquiry carried your letterhead.

API access: discovery in your workflow

Our first public API is live. Submit Information Frontier Agent queries, poll status, and pull source rows — with evidence cells and contact fields — straight from your scripts, agents, or internal tooling.

Discovery no longer has to live in the dashboard. Pipe IFA results into your internal data catalog. Trigger a query from your research notebook. Let your own agents call ours. The dashboard remains the richest way to explore results, but it is no longer the only door into the system.

Spin up a key under Settings → API keys and run your first query with the docs at brickroad.network/api/v1/docs.md. Get in touch to talk organization-scoped access.

Where this leaves the sourcing pipeline

Step back and the shape of the product is now visible end to end:

Discovery was the first bottleneck, and we spent our first several quarters on it. But the clients getting the most out of Brickroad were always the ones who treated discovery as the start of a pipeline, not the end of one. This release is us building the rest of that pipeline into the product.

Get started

• Open Sources from the sidebar, or hit "Explore new sources" from any IFA run to land at the same page, filtered to that query
• Request a sample from any supplier row and you'll find your agent's draft waiting in the Outbox
• Spin up an API key under Settings → API keys and run your first query with the docs at brickroad.network/api/v1/docs.md

What's next

In the coming weeks: vendor management tooling for contracts and usage monitoring, new API endpoints for faster data connectivity, a benchmark series on data access and conversion metrics, and some exciting third-party visualization tooling.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Sources tab? Sources is an organization-wide catalog of every data supplier surfaced by your Information Frontier Agent, across all queries, Streams, and workspaces. It supports sorting by novelty, ticker, geography, contactability, and keyword, and filtering by contact level, feasibility, query, region, sector, and minimum novelty.

What is a Subnet? A Subnet is a saved slice of the Sources catalog — a filtered view you can name and share across your workspace or pod. Think of it as a saved search over your organization's supplier universe.

Does the Agent Outbox send emails automatically? No. Every outbound message is human-gated: the agent drafts outreach and follow-ups, but nothing is sent until a human edits, approves, or rejects it. Once approved, the agent manages the sequence and collects responses and samples in its own mailbox.

What does pseudonymous outreach mean? Outreach is conducted from an agent identity rather than your corporate domain, so suppliers engage with a legitimate counterparty without learning which organization is sourcing until you choose to disclose it. This lets teams automate the first touch without broadcasting their thesis to the market.

What can I do with the API? Submit IFA queries, poll their status, and retrieve source rows including evidence cells and contact fields. It is designed for scripts, internal tooling, and agent-to-agent integration. Documentation lives at brickroad.network/api/v1/docs.md; reach out for organization-scoped access.

How do I get started? Open the Sources tab from the sidebar, or click "Explore new sources" from any IFA run. New users can sign up at brickroad.network or grab time directly on Freeman's calendar.

The shorter version

Discovery went on autopilot last quarter. This quarter, everything after discovery follows.

Every supplier your agents surface now lands in Sources — one living catalog, filterable by novelty, feasibility, region, sector, and contactability, viewable as a Mesh or a Grid, shareable as Subnets. Request a sample and your agent drafts pseudonymous outreach, sequences the follow-ups, and collects the sample in its own mailbox, with you approving every send. And with the public API, all of it is callable from your own scripts, agents, and tooling.

Thesis to catalog to sample request, without leaving Brickroad.

As always, thank you for building with us. We read every reply — grab time on the calendar if you want a walkthrough.

Brick by Brick.