---
title: "Capability: Find 10 AI Startup Founders"
description: "How nqzai's lead-search tool turns a request like \"find 10 AI startup founders\" into a structured search across your saved contacts, our shared lead database, and a live provider search — with every email checked before it's marked deliverable."
answer_summary: "How nqzai's lead-search tool turns a request like \"find 10 AI startup founders\" into a structured search across your saved contacts, our shared lead database, and a live provider search — with every email checked before it's marked deliverable."
canonical: "https://nqz.ai/blog/capability-find-10-ai-startup-founders"
published_at: "2026-07-03T10:59:34.310413+00:00"
updated_at: "2026-08-21T10:18:53.000Z"
author: "Ada O'Brien"
category: "Capabilities"
tags: ["capability","lead-search","ai-startups"]
image: "https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1504868584819-f8e8b4b6d7e3?w=1200&h=630&fit=crop"
---

# Capability: Find 10 AI Startup Founders

# Capability: Find 10 AI Startup Founders

Type "find 10 AI startup founders" into nqzai's chat and the assistant runs its lead-search capability — the same tool behind every "find me contacts" request in the product, whether the audience is startup founders, developers, healthcare practices, or local businesses. This article explains, plainly and without embellishment, what that tool actually does: how it interprets a request like this one, where it looks for people, what it checks before handing you a result, and what its real limits are.

## Quick Answer

- If you're building an early outbound list for a niche audience → ask for specific details like industry or company size, because adding these costs nothing extra and narrows the free-tier search.
- If you need to avoid spending tokens unnecessarily → confirm you already don't have matching saved contacts or shared-database leads first, because the tool checks both free sources before asking to run a paid search.
- If you need to target founders by a US state → you must search at the country level instead, because geography currently works only at the country level—not state-level—and the tool will state that plainly rather than ignore or refuse the request.

## What it does

**Direct answer:** Lead search takes a natural-language request and turns it into a small set of structured fields rather than treating your sentence as a search string to guess at. For "find 10 AI startup founders" it would typically fill in:

- **search type**: people (as opposed to a local, brick-and-mortar business search)
- **audience**: startup — which tells the system to look at founders and early-stage companies specifically
- **person titles**: Founder, Co-Founder, CEO (the default set for a startup audience, or whatever titles you named)
- **topic**: "AI" / "artificial intelligence" — a free-text signal used to rank results by relevance
- **count**: 10

Before it searches for anything new, it checks whether you already have matching contacts saved and asks whether you'd like to use those or look for new ones — it does not silently re-spend on people you've already found. Only after you confirm you want new contacts does it run the actual search.

One practical detail worth knowing up front: if your account hasn't added a token top-up, results from a paid search are capped at 10 delivered contacts per search regardless of how many you ask for. That cap is exactly why "find 10" is a natural request size for this capability, though you can ask for more if you've topped up.

## How it works

**Direct answer:** The search runs as a waterfall, checking cheaper and free sources before touching anything that costs tokens:

1. **Your own saved contacts** — checked first, at no cost, and skipped only if you explicitly ask for contacts you don't already have.
2. **nqzai's shared lead database** — a pool of previously discovered companies and people that other searches have already surfaced. Matching against it costs nothing extra; it's checked before anything paid.
3. **A live search across a broader company and people data source** — this is the paid step, priced in tokens rather than dollars, and it only runs if you've agreed to it. By default, the search stops after the free tiers and tells you how many of your requested 10 it could supply for free — if the answer is short of 10, it reports the shortfall honestly ("found 4 of 10 without a paid search — want me to look further for the rest?") instead of quietly padding the list or spending your tokens without asking.
4. **Email verification** — every candidate email address that comes back is checked against a live mailbox-verification step before it's marked usable. The result isn't a single yes/no: each contact is labeled valid, risky, or unverified, and that label is stored and shown honestly rather than presenting every address as equally trustworthy. An address the system can't confirm is never silently upgraded to "verified."

A few things about how the request itself gets interpreted are worth calling out because they directly shape what you get back:

- **Specific detail is free.** Adding detail to your request — naming an industry, a company size band, or a country — doesn't make the search more expensive; the underlying search cost is the same either way. But an unrequested filter can only narrow what comes back, so the tool is built to only apply filters you actually asked for.
- **The "topic" you describe (e.g. "AI," "fintech founders," "programmatic SEO agencies") doesn't filter the search on the provider side** — it's used to locally re-rank whichever batch of candidates was fetched, so the most topically relevant people rise to the top of what you see.
- **Geography works at the country level today**, not state-level. If you ask for founders in a specific US state, the system records that you asked, but it can't yet narrow a search down to a state — it will tell you that plainly rather than quietly returning nothing or ignoring the request.

Once a search completes, the resulting contacts are saved to a contact list in your account (a new one is created if needed, or you can name an existing one), and you can optionally have them assigned straight into a campaign.

## Example use cases

- **Early outbound to a niche audience.** "Find 10 AI startup founders working on agentic tooling" gives you a working list of founders to reach out to without manually searching company directories one at a time.
- **Building a first list before drafting emails.** Because search results are saved as contacts, they flow directly into nqzai's email-drafting and lightweight campaign-sequencing tools — search, review, draft, and (with your explicit confirmation) send, all in the same conversation.
- **Refining a broad ask into a precise one.** "Founders" is a valid starting point, but adding an industry, a company-size band, or naming specific companies narrows the same search for free — useful when your first list turns out too broad.
- **Local business outreach that isn't people-search at all.** The same underlying tool handles a completely different shape of request — "find 10 dentists in Austin" — by switching to a local-business search keyed on a business category and a locality or postcode instead of job titles.

## What a typical result looks like (illustrative)

**Direct answer:** The example below is **illustrative only** — invented names, not a real search result — built to show the actual shape of what the tool returns for each contact, not to describe a real company or person.

| Name | Title | Company (domain) | Verification status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priya Menon | Co-Founder & CEO | fluxloop.ai | valid |
| Marcus Ferreira | Founder | delta-agents.io | valid |
| Wei Tanaka | Co-Founder & CTO | orbitlabs.dev | risky |
| Aisha Bello | Founder | northstar.build | unverified |

A real result set carries the same shape — name, title, company/domain, and an honest verification status per contact — plus the underlying email address stored against each saved contact. Notice that not every row says "valid": a contact with "risky" or "unverified" status is one the system could not affirmatively confirm as deliverable, and it's kept in the list labeled that way rather than dropped silently or upgraded to look more certain than it is.

## Limitations and what it's not

- **It's not a bottomless database lookup.** It waterfalls through your own contacts and a shared pool first, and only reaches for a paid, broader search with your explicit go-ahead — so a request can come back short of the number you asked for, honestly reported as a shortfall rather than silently padded.
- **It doesn't fabricate people or addresses.** If an email can't be confirmed, it's labeled risky or unverified rather than presented as a checked, deliverable address.
- **"Topic" is a ranking signal, not a filter.** Describing what a company works on (e.g. "agentic AI") sorts the fetched results by relevance; it doesn't narrow the underlying search the way naming an industry or a specific title does.
- **US state-level targeting isn't supported yet.** Country-level geography works; asking for a specific state is recorded but currently can't narrow the search, and the tool says so rather than returning an unexplained empty result.
- **It's a paid capability past the free tiers.** Searches beyond what your saved contacts and the shared pool can supply are priced in tokens and only run after you agree — it's not run speculatively in the background.
- **It's one part of a larger flow.** On its own it produces a contact list; turning that list into outreach still goes through nqzai's separate email-drafting and send tools, each with its own confirmation step before anything goes out.

## Evidence, limits, and reproducible use


**Direct answer:** **Reproducible workflow.** Provide the intended audience and campaign context, inspect the proposed records or draft, then explicitly approve any action that changes a campaign or sends email. Keep suppression, consent, and sender-domain decisions outside a generated draft and review them before use.


**Limit.** This result does not establish identity, consent, legal basis, deliverability, or a right to contact a person. A draft or campaign configuration is a review artifact, not an instruction to send.

For the currently exposed nqzai workflow and connection limits, check the [public capabilities inventory](https://nqz.ai/capabilities) before relying on a result.

## Primary references

- [FTC CAN-SPAM compliance guide](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business)
- [Google sender guidelines](https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126)