my research agent confidently merged the founders of two totally unrelated startups because they were both named "Blue"

Reddit r/AI_Agents Tools

Summary

A research agent used for deal screening confused two startups named 'Blue' due to ambiguous naming, leading to mixed data; a simple fix was to skip internet search when trusted founder data is available.

so i run an agent that researches companies for deal screening - founders, background, all that. yesterday it hit a company literally just named "Blue" and things went sideways. it searched for founders, got back 11 names... except those 11 names belonged to TWO completely different startups that both happen to be called "Blue". one was the actual company we cared about, the other was some totally unrelated startup from a recent YC batch that also picked the same name. the agent had zero way to tell them apart from the name alone, so it just started blending founders from both companies into one "team" writeup. we do have a cleanup step meant to catch garbage like this, and to be fair it did catch it - but its fix was just to nuke the whole thing and return nothing. so now instead of wrong data we had zero data for a company we actually needed to screen. not exactly progress lol the fix that actually worked was kind of dumb in hindsight - if we already have a verified founder list from another source we trust, just use that and skip the "go search the internet for this company's founders" step completely. dont even let the ambiguous name situation happen in the first place. curious if anyone else building research/enrichment agents has run into this with generic or short company names. feels like the more common the word, the worse it gets. is everyone just avoiding the search when possible like we did, or has anyone actually built real disambiguation (cross referencing domain, location, sector etc) that works well
Original Article

Similar Articles