Connect an AI Agent to Startup Ignition

The Startup Ignition site hosts a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at https://www.startupignition.com/mcp. Once connected, an AI agent can subscribe people to the newsletter, send contact-form messages, look up bootcamp cohorts, list portfolio companies, and search the news archive — all conversationally, with no API keys.

Transport: Streamable HTTP, protocol version 2025-06-18. No authentication required.

Looking for the ToolSuite connector? To let Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or another assistant work with your own ideas in ToolSuite (signed in, with permissions and a credit limit), see Connect your AI assistant to ToolSuite. This page covers the public website agent.

Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop currently speaks MCP over stdio. Use the mcp-remote proxy to connect it to a remote HTTP server.

Open Settings → Developer → Edit Config
Paste this into claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "startup-ignition": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://www.startupignition.com/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You should see the Startup Ignition tools appear in the tool picker.

Claude.ai (Custom Connector)

On Claude.ai (Pro/Team), open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector and enter:

Name:    Startup Ignition
URL:     https://www.startupignition.com/mcp
OAuth:   not required (public, unauthenticated)

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or the workspace-level .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "startup-ignition": {
      "url": "https://www.startupignition.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Other clients

Any MCP client that speaks Streamable HTTP can connect by pointing at https://www.startupignition.com/mcp. The server is fully introspectable — call initialize, then tools/list, resources/list, and prompts/list.

What you get

Write tools (form submissions)

subscribe_newsletter — subscribe an email to the newsletter
signup_masterclass — register an email for the free masterclass
submit_contact — send a contact-form message to a specific team
request_investor_deck — request the SI Ventures investor deck

Read tools (live data)

get_bootcamp_cohorts — list bootcamp cohorts (filter by free/full/past)
get_portfolio_companies — list portfolio companies (filter by siv-fund-i / previous)
search_news — keyword-search news posts

Resources

/llms.txt — short site overview
/llms-full.txt — full site context
/docs/api/openapi.json — OpenAPI 3.1 spec
/.well-known/agent-card.json — A2A agent card

Try it from a terminal

1. Initialize:

curl -sS https://www.startupignition.com/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "initialize",
    "params": {
      "protocolVersion": "2025-06-18",
      "capabilities": {},
      "clientInfo": { "name": "curl", "version": "0" }
    }
  }'

2. List tools:

curl -sS https://www.startupignition.com/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 2, "method": "tools/list" }'

3. Call a read tool:

curl -sS https://www.startupignition.com/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 3,
    "method": "tools/call",
    "params": {
      "name": "get_bootcamp_cohorts",
      "arguments": { "status": "free" }
    }
  }'

Privacy

All write tools submit data to the same intake pipeline as the public forms on the site (CRM + email notification). All read tools return information that is already public on the site. No PII is read; nothing is logged that the public forms wouldn't capture.