FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers about what InsightNodes is, how it works, and how it compares to other research tools.
What is InsightNodes?
InsightNodes is a technology intelligence platform that maps real, evidence-backed relationships across the technology landscape — companies, capital, policy, and people — starting with AI infrastructure and expanding from there. Instead of a flat database of tagged entities, it's a connected knowledge graph: every relationship is explicit, typed, and sourced to a primary document.
How is InsightNodes different from CB Insights or Crunchbase?
CB Insights and Crunchbase are primarily company databases — profiles, funding rounds, market maps. InsightNodes is a connected graph where relationships (supplies, competes-with, invests-in, depends-on) are modeled directly and every claim traces to a source. It also includes an AI Q&A layer that answers only from that sourced repository, never from general knowledge.
Where does InsightNodes get its data?
Every claim in InsightNodes traces back to a real source: SEC filings, official company announcements and investor materials, government releases, or clearly-labeled independent research when that's the most honest category for a given fact. Sources are shown directly on each entity's page, not hidden behind the product.
Does InsightNodes cover companies and regulators outside the U.S.?
Today, InsightNodes' sourcing leans toward U.S. capital markets — SEC filings, the CHIPS Act, and other U.S. regulatory releases — reflecting where the founder's research background and the deepest, most consistently disclosed data currently sit. Major non-U.S. entities (TSMC, ASML, SK hynix, and others) are already tracked, but structured sourcing directly from East Asian (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan) and European regulatory bodies is an active roadmap item, not an oversight, and will expand coverage as it's built out.
Is InsightNodes free to use?
Yes. InsightNodes is free to explore with no signup wall — you can browse the graph, drill into any entity, and use the Q&A feature without creating an account. A Watchlist feature requires a free account if you want to track specific entities over time.
What does "Connected Intelligence" mean?
Connected Intelligence is the idea that technology doesn't move in isolation — a chip shortage, a policy change, or a funding round only makes sense in the context of what it's connected to. InsightNodes models those connections explicitly as a graph, rather than presenting technology news as a list of disconnected headlines.
Can I ask InsightNodes questions directly?
Yes. InsightNodes has an AI-powered Q&A feature that answers questions using only the evidence-backed repository — it won't fill gaps with general AI knowledge, and if the graph doesn't have enough sourced data to answer confidently, it says so rather than guessing.
Does InsightNodes cover anything outside AI infrastructure?
InsightNodes started with AI infrastructure — chips, foundries, hyperscalers, sovereign capital, policy — because that's where the founder's own research background is deepest and the connections are richest today. Coverage is actively expanding into the broader technology landscape from that starting point.
Who is InsightNodes built for?
InsightNodes is built primarily for investment researchers, semiconductor and AI infrastructure analysts, policy researchers, venture and private equity professionals, corporate strategists, and journalists covering technology — anyone who needs to understand how a company, technology, or policy decision actually connects to everything else, with real sourcing behind every connection.
How often is InsightNodes' data updated?
Entity data and relationships are updated as new sourced evidence becomes available. Live financial metrics (price, market cap, P/E, revenue) for publicly listed companies refresh daily via an automated job pulling from market data feeds, so those specific figures reflect the most recent trading day.
What do "strategic importance" and "confidence" mean on an entity page?
Strategic importance (Critical, Very High, High, Medium, or Emerging) is our editorial judgment of how central an entity is to the technology landscape we track. Confidence (0-100%) reflects how well-sourced and current the underlying evidence is — it's not a rating of the entity itself, just of how solid our data on it is.
What is the "Market Intelligence" section on some entity pages?
It's a deliberately separate, clearly-labeled tier for credibly-reported but unconfirmed claims — analyst notes, reporting citing "people familiar with the matter," deals where the companies involved declined to comment. Everything else on InsightNodes (evidence, relationships, milestones) represents information we treat as established fact; Market Intelligence items are the opposite by design; each one names its actual source and explains why it's unconfirmed, so you can decide for yourself whether to dig further rather than mistaking a lead for a fact.
What is the "chokepoint score" on an entity page?
It's a count of how many other entities in the graph record a dependency on this one — a depends-on, supplied-by, developed-by, uses, or regulated-by relationship naming it as the target. A high score (NVIDIA, TSMC, and AWS all score highest as of this writing) means a large share of the tracked landscape would be structurally exposed if that entity were disrupted. Unlike strategic importance and confidence, it isn't an editorial judgment — it's computed directly and automatically from the relationship data itself every time the page loads, so it always reflects the current state of the graph. A score of 0 means nothing currently depends on it directly in our data, not that the entity is unimportant — it may simply be positioned as a dependent rather than a supplier in what we've mapped so far.
What are "Earnings-Call Mentions" on an entity page?
It's a weekly-refreshed feature that reads a public company's own SEC 8-K earnings exhibits and extracts the literal sentences naming another tracked entity — a real, dated quote, never a paraphrase or an inferred relationship. Only exact or clearly-aliased matches against the tracked graph are kept, so every mention is independently verifiable against the original filing.
What is the "Federal Contract Disclosures" section on some entity pages?
For Critical, Very High, and High-tier tracked companies, InsightNodes checks USAspending.gov's free public award ledger monthly and records real federal contract awards — the awarding agency, dollar amount, and award ID. It's a direct, sourced check on a company's own claims about government revenue, not a summary of a press release.