When to use it: Weekly sourcing run, or a notable operator at a target company leaves their role.
Search new founder roles with POST /person_role_search/ (role_title: founder OR co-founder, person_headline: stealth, role_position_start_date in the last 90 days)
Read prior roles and education with POST /person_detail_lookup/ to score fit with the fund thesis
Fetch a personal email via POST /person_contacts_lookup/personal_emails/, since a stealth company has no domain yet
Add the founder to the fund's CRM with the source and a suggested partner
Inputs
Outputs
fund thesis keywords
new founders
target employers (optional)
prior employers and education
personal email
Related recipe
Source former employees of a target company as paid experts
When to use it: A consultant or investor requests experts on a company or market.
Show the steps
Search past roles with POST /person_role_search/ (organizations, role_is_current = false, role_position_end_date window)
Verify employment history with POST /person_detail_lookup/ before compliance screening
Reach candidates on personal_email (they have left the company)
Schedule calls or AI-run interviews and record credentials
Who evaluates personal emails at VC/PE sourcing and research, and what they are judged on
Product manager who owns the enrichment feature: judged on what users see when they open a record
Engineering lead integrating the API: judged on response time and errors they can route on
Partnerships or data lead managing vendors: judged on cost per valid result
A selection of VC and PE research teams using Forager for personal emails · plus other teams on ForagerA selection of teams using Forager
Clay
GTM workflow builders
Selected use case: Forager mobile numbers, emails and people data inside Clay tables.
Juicebox
AI candidate sourcing
Selected use case: Forager data behind its PeopleGPT search and sourcing agents.
QuruAI
VC & PE research
Expert-research platform that matches a research thesis to operators and practitioners for AI-led interviews.
Chamaeleon
VC & PE research
Early-stage venture firm that analyses companies with its own AI and quantitative engine.
DealSource
VC & PE research
Selected use case: company and people data for private-company profiles.
SeekOut
Talent intelligence
Selected use case: Forager’s people data feed, used to keep candidate profiles current.
2–3 years on the Forager people data feed, by SeekOut’s own account1
Evident
Market intelligence
Publisher of the Evident AI Index, which ranks banks, insurers and payments firms on AI maturity.
Orbital
Lead databases
Selected use case: contact lookups in its enrichment waterfall, for teams selling to local businesses.
Sources
1 SeekOut: SeekOut, customer interview, Sep 2026.
“We use Forager to enrich our contact data with email addresses and mobile phone numbers. After analyzing all the data providers we use, we found Forager to deliver the best overall data quality.”
AndelaRyley L.Growth Marketing Associate
800M+people
65M+companies
How to test it
Test personal emails on your own sample
Pull a sample. Take profiles your users looked up last week.
Run it. Use a self-serve key, or book a demo and send us the list.
Measure what your users feel. Connect rate for mobiles, bounces for emails, and whether the right person answers.
How do VC and PE research use Forager personal emails?
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Help a venture fund find people who recently left a role to start a company, often listed as "stealth", and reach them before a round is announced. Personal email addresses for reaching people outside their work inbox, such as passive candidates and founders. This page walks through 2 workflows with the exact steps.
What do personal emails cost for VC and PE research?
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Personal emails: 5 credits per personal email found, and a personal email lookup that finds nothing costs 0 credits. That is $0.07 per personal email on Starter month to month and $0.05 on Pro with yearly billing. Self-serve plans are Starter, Growth, Pro and Scale. See plans and prices
Why do VC and PE research add personal emails?
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Source founders and operators without scraping profiles. Products like yours are judged on freshness and fields, which is why the cost that counts is per result that reaches the right person. Run your own sample to see what personal emails returns for your users before you build on it.
How do I find stealth startup founders?
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Search new founder roles with POST /person_role_search/ (role_title: founder OR co-founder, person_headline: stealth, role_position_start_date in the last 90 days). Fetch a personal email via POST /person_contacts_lookup/personal_emails/, since a stealth company has no domain yet.
What do I send, and what comes back?
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You send fund thesis keywords, role/function and target company. You get back expert candidates, new founders, personal email and personal_email, as JSON.
Can we show Forager data inside our product?
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Yes, under platform terms. Self-serve plans cover internal use by your own team. Showing Forager contacts to your users, or passing records on, is licensed separately: talk to sales about volume and which fields your users need to see.
Am I charged when no personal email is found?
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No. A personal email lookup that finds nothing costs 0 credits, so you pay for personal emails we find. Search, enrichment and reverse lookups are the exception: they are charged per request.
Is there a free way to try Forager?
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Yes. Create a free account at app.forager.ai: it comes with $5 in free credits and an API key, and there is no credit card to sign up. Run it on records you already know, or book a demo and send us a list: we run it and show you what we find.
How do I find former employees of a company for expert calls?
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Reach candidates on personal_email (they have left the company). Schedule calls or AI-run interviews and record credentials.
How do I know the data is right?
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The test that counts is your own: send a list of profiles you care about. We run it and show you what we find, number by number, so you can measure hit rate and connect rate yourself.
When should I use a personal email instead of a work email?
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Use a personal email when the person may not read, or may not stay at, their work inbox: passive candidates, founders, alumni and people between jobs. Use a work email for business outreach to someone at their current employer. Forager prices both the same: email lookups are charged only when an address is found.
Does Forager integrate with the tools we already use?
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Native in Clay and Zapier, partner-built in Deepline and called through the API from Make, n8n and your own code. Everything else connects through the REST API with one API key.
Written answers are not available right now. The matching pages above still help, or book a demo and ask the team.
