About
A research desk that runs on agents.
MergeSearch is what a research desk looks like when it is built today, from nothing, on AI agents. A brief goes in. Agents do the reading. A gate re-fetches every source we cite before a single figure is allowed to ship. What comes back within 24 hours is the study a firm used to wait weeks for.
The idea
Built as a system, not staffed as a department.
A research desk has always been a room of people, and everything about the way research gets bought follows from that. It is slow because reading is slow, it costs what a team of senior people costs, and it only ever gets pointed at work that is already signed, because nobody can justify a researcher week on a mandate they might not win. Hiring differently changes none of that.
So we did not build a room. MergeSearch is an agent system we wrote and operate ourselves, and the map is its output: the sourcing, the reading, the sizing and the cross-checking all run as software, one research agent per module of the map, working in parallel. Not a workflow with an AI step bolted into it.
That is the reason the offer is possible. A finished market, money, talent and plan study on your brief, every figure linked to the public record behind it, in your portal within 24 hours, at a price you can read off the page. It was never a person-week, so it was never priced like one.
Inside the engine
What happens between your brief and your map.
Your brief becomes the scope
Sector, seat, geography, what is off-limits. One intake, and the run is built for your search instead of pulled off a template.
Agents work it in parallel
The map is built module by module, and each module has its own research agent on the primary record at the same time: filings, registries, compensation data, ownership, press, government statistics. All of it gets read at the same time, which is how the map covers this much ground.
A gate re-fetches every source
Every load-bearing figure carries the URL it came from. Before the map is assembled, the gate goes back out and fetches each one: a dead or blocked link is flagged, and the figures in the claim have to still be on the page. What fails the check routes to a person instead of shipping.
Then a person reads it
Every number is labeled fact, estimate or inference. One of us reads the finished map, flags and all, before it lands in your portal. Nothing leaves here unread.
The standard
What the engine is not allowed to do.
Speed is easy to claim. These four rules are what a map is checked against before it reaches you, and they are the reason you can put one in front of a client.
No figure without a public source
Every load-bearing number links out to the record it came from, and you can open it. If we could not source it, it does not go in the map.
No estimate dressed as a fact
Fact, estimate and inference are labeled on the page, next to the number. You always know which kind of claim you are holding in front of a client.
Nothing private, ever
The public record only: filings, registries, releases, statistics, press. No client files, no private databases, nothing you would have to explain in the room.
Nothing ships unread
A system can be wrong. That is why the gate exists, and why one of the two of us signs off on every map before you see it.
Who you work with
Two people, and nobody in between.
The company is deliberately small, because the system carries the volume. We carry the judgement, and you deal with us directly: no account managers, no juniors learning on your brief, no handoffs.
Mathijs Bronsdijk
Builds and runs the engine
The orchestration, the research agents, the verification gate and the portal are his. If a step can be automated and then checked, he has usually already done both, and he stays in the build until it runs without anyone touching it.
Bret van Putten
Runs the desk with clients
Lives in the briefs, the markets and the pitch that has to be won on Thursday. He reads a market and knows which conversation to book first, and he is the reason the engine answers a question a client asked rather than a hypothetical one.
MergeSearch is part of MBWorkers, registered in the Netherlands. Executive search is the market we run in today.
Start
See what the engine hands back.
Send one line of brief and read a finished map on your own mandate. Your first month is free, so you hold the thing before you decide anything about the people who built it.