Canonical — MCP Server

Find the companies others miss. Canonical is a verified company graph — not a web search. Describe what you want in plain English (or pass structured filters) and get a precise, LLM-verified, domain-keyed shortlist your agent can act on.

This is the public home of Canonical's remote MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. It documents the server and ships a one-click Cursor plugin. The server itself is hosted — there's nothing to run locally.

Server URL: https://trycanonical.ai/mcp
Transport: Streamable HTTP
Auth: OAuth 2.0 with dynamic client registration (scope search) — read-only
Listed on: Official MCP Registry (ai.trycanonical/company-search) · Smithery

Tools

The server exposes five read-only tools:

Tool	Purpose
`search_companies`	Structured company search — free-text `description` plus typed filters (location, employee size, funding stage/amount/investor, founder attributes, exclusions). Unsupported constraints are reported back, never silently dropped.
`find_similar_companies`	Find companies similar to a seed domain. Multi-axis rerank across semantics, dimensions, funding, geo, investors, and size.
`get_company_details`	Full canonical profile for one company by domain, including founders/execs and their prior-employer category tags (e.g. FAANG, unicorn, MBB).
`lookup_companies`	Disambiguate a free-text company name to a canonical domain. Returns ranked candidates with confidence levels.
`get_account_status`	Credit balance, plan, and search rate limits. Read-only, charges no credits.

Related MCP server: Sylex Search

Install

On first use, your client opens Canonical's OAuth consent flow in the browser — there's no API key to copy.

Cursor

Install from the Cursor marketplace, or add the server manually to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global) or <project>/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canonical": {
      "url": "https://trycanonical.ai/mcp",
      "type": "streamable-http"
    }
  }
}

Claude (Desktop / Code / claude.ai)

Add a custom connector with the URL https://trycanonical.ai/mcp and complete the OAuth flow. Step-by-step: https://trycanonical.ai/documentation/mcp

VS Code (Copilot)

{
  "servers": {
    "canonical": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://trycanonical.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Any MCP client

Point it at the streamable-HTTP endpoint https://trycanonical.ai/mcp and authorize via OAuth. Full client-by-client setup lives at https://trycanonical.ai/documentation/mcp.

Auth & pricing

Auth: OAuth 2.0 with dynamic client registration (scope search). Read-only — no destructive operations.
Free tier: 250 credits on signup, no credit card required.
Docs: https://trycanonical.ai/documentation/mcp
Privacy: https://trycanonical.ai/privacy-policy · Terms: https://trycanonical.ai/terms
Support: support@trycanonical.ai

Example prompts

"Find fintech startups in India that raised Series A in the last 6 months."
"Show me companies similar to stripe.com but headquartered in Europe."
"Who are the founders of anthropic.com and where did they work before?"
"List YC-backed B2B SaaS companies with a technical cofounder."

Repository contents

Path	What
`.cursor-plugin/plugin.json`	Cursor plugin manifest (makes this repo a valid Cursor plugin).
`mcp.json`	Remote server config — used by the Cursor plugin and copy-pasteable into any client.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. This license covers the contents of this repository (manifest + docs); the Canonical service itself is operated at https://trycanonical.ai under its own terms.

Canonical Company Search