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Integrations

Talk to Your Portfolio:
Getting the Pinion MCP Up and Running

Pinion's dashboard and reports are the backbone of how most users interact with their portfolio — they're fast, they're visual, and they surface the metrics that matter at a glance. But every once in a while, you have a question the dashboard wasn't designed for. Which of my 2022 vintage deals are actually pulling their weight? Did anyone send a worrying update last month? Am I overweight in fintech without realizing it? These sit just outside the standard views — answerable with your data, but only if you're willing to export, pivot, and assemble the picture yourself. That's exactly the gap the Pinion MCP integration fills.

What MCP actually is

Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI assistants talk to external services in a structured way — think of it as a USB port for AI. When you connect Pinion via MCP, you're giving your assistant a small, well-defined set of read-only capabilities, and nothing more. Your data stays in Pinion; the AI just gets to ask questions about it.

The Pinion MCP exposes exactly five tools:

Portfolio summary Total invested, current value, and TVPI across direct investments and funds.
List investments All direct investments with MOIC, optionally filtered by status.
List funds All venture funds with NAV, distributions, and MOIC on called capital.
Investment details Deep-dive on a single company including round history and recent AI-analyzed updates.
Recent investor updates Latest updates across the portfolio with sentiment scores, flags, and extracted metrics.
🔒 The MCP is read-only. You can ask questions and get answers, but you can't add, edit, or delete anything through it. This is by design — your portfolio data is too important to expose to AI write operations.

Setup

Step 1 — Create an API key

MCP integration is available on Family and Team plans. From your Pinion app, go to Settings → API Keys and click + New key. Give it a name that tells you what it's for — "My Laptop", "Claude Desktop", "Work MacBook" — so you can revoke it cleanly later if you need to.

⚠️ The key is shown once and only once. Copy it before closing the dialog. If you lose it, revoke it and create a new one.

Create a separate key per device rather than reusing one. If a laptop goes missing or a team member leaves, you can revoke that single key without touching anyone else's setup.

Step 2 — Connect your AI tool

Claude Code (terminal)

Run this command, replacing the placeholder with your actual key:

claude mcp add --transport http pinion https://pinion.vc/.netlify/functions/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer pinion_xxxx"

Verify with claude mcp list. Restart Claude Code if it was already running.

Claude (desktop or web app)

Paste the following into a Claude chat, replacing the placeholder with your real key. Claude will run the setup command for you. 

Set up the Pinion MCP server in my Claude Code config. The server URL is
https://pinion.vc/.netlify/functions/mcp and my API key is pinion_xxxx.
Use the claude mcp add command.
⚠️ After setup this way, rotate the key — create a fresh one in Pinion, update your config, and revoke the original. It takes two minutes and ensures the key isn't sitting in your chat history.

Cursor, Windsurf, and other MCP clients

MCP is an open protocol, so any compatible client uses the same URL and key. Add this block to your client's MCP configuration file: 

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pinion": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://pinion.vc/.netlify/functions/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer pinion_xxxx"
      }
    }
  }
}

Config file locations vary by tool — check your client's MCP documentation for the exact path.

Verify it's working

Ask your assistant: "Summarize my Pinion portfolio." If it comes back with real numbers — TVPI, total invested, current value — you're connected. If it shrugs, double-check the key and restart the client.

Workflows

What to actually do with it

Tier 1: Single-question lookups

These are the obvious wins, and they're genuinely useful even though they're simple. The reason they're worth mentioning isn't novelty — it's that they replace small bits of friction you don't notice until they're gone.

"What's my current TVPI?"
"Which of my investments has the highest MOIC?"
"How much capital have I deployed into venture funds versus direct deals?"
"What did Acme Corp report in their last investor update?"
"Which companies have sent updates in the last quarter?"

These work just as well in the dashboard, of course — but having them at conversational reach means you can fire off a quick question without breaking your flow, whether you're in your inbox, your terminal, or a planning doc. The dashboard is still the right place to browse. The MCP is the right place to ask.

Tier 2: Multi-step analysis

Each of the five MCP tools does one thing, but a good AI assistant chains them together to answer questions no single endpoint was designed to handle.

The stale-deal radar. Ask: "List my active investments and tell me which haven't had an investor update in the last 90 days." The assistant pulls list_investments, then checks get_recent_investor_updates for each, and surfaces a quiet list. That list is your call sheet for the week — the kind of thing you know you should track but never actually do.

Concentration check. Ask: "Group my direct investments by sector and tell me where I'm most concentrated." The AI rolls up your sector tags and tells you, say, that 38% of your deployed capital is in B2B SaaS and 4% is in climate. Whether that's a problem is up to you. Knowing it is the first step.

Vintage performance. Ask: "Compare the MOIC of my 2021 vintage deals against my 2023 vintage deals." Vintage matters more than people credit — surfacing it explicitly is often a wake-up call.

Update digest. Ask: "Read all investor updates from the last 60 days and tell me the three biggest themes — what's working, what's not, and which companies look like they need attention." The AI weighs structural facts over founder tone, so a confident-sounding email about a recapitalization at lower pricing won't sneak past it. You get a one-screen synthesis of what would otherwise be twenty PDFs sitting in your inbox.

Pre-call prep. Before a check-in with a founder, ask: "Pull up everything on Acme Corp — investment history, recent updates, sentiment trend, key metrics — and give me five questions I should ask on Friday's call." You walk in informed without spending forty minutes assembling a briefing doc.

Tier 3: Cross-tool workflows

If you have other MCP servers connected — Gmail, Google Calendar, QuickBooks, Canva, Drive — Pinion gets dramatically more powerful. The AI can use Pinion as one source and another tool as a second source, then act on the combination.

Inbox triage tied to portfolio status. "Pull my list of active portfolio companies from Pinion, then search my Gmail for any unread messages from those founders. Show me the ones I haven't replied to in more than two weeks." You stop missing founder emails because they're buried under newsletters and your AI knows which senders matter.

Calendar blocking by importance. "List my top ten direct investments by current valuation. Block 30-minute quarterly check-in slots with each of them on my calendar over the next three weeks." Whether you actually take the meeting is up to you, but the scheduling stops being a chore.

Reconciliation against accounting. If you have QuickBooks connected: "List the capital calls I've recorded in Pinion this year and compare them against wire transfers in QuickBooks. Flag any mismatches." Catching one $50K data-entry error pays for the integration on its own.

Family office one-pager. "Summarize my portfolio performance for the last quarter. Generate a Pinion-branded one-page Canva design with the top-line numbers, top three performers, and biggest write-downs." You go from raw data to a board-ready document without touching a design tool.

LP-style quarterly letter. "Draft a quarterly investor letter using my Pinion data — TVPI and IRR, top performers, write-downs, biggest themes from investor updates this quarter. Keep it to 600 words." Even if you're investing your own capital, this kind of artifact forces you to articulate what's actually happening in your book.

Tier 4: Strategic prompts

These are the questions that don't have a single right answer, but where having the data immediately at hand changes how seriously you can engage with them. The AI won't make these decisions for you — it surfaces the relevant facts without asking you to assemble them first, which is most of the work.

"If I had another $250K to deploy this quarter, which existing portfolio companies look like the best follow-on candidates based on update sentiment and momentum?"
"Which of my investments are most at risk based on recent update flags? Walk me through your reasoning."
"I'm thinking about my 2026 allocation. Look at my deployment pace over the last two years and tell me whether I'm over- or under-pacing."
"What does my realized vs. unrealized performance look like, and what does that imply about my exit cadence?"

Reference

A few things worth knowing

The MCP is read-only. You can't add or modify investments through it. That's by design — your portfolio data is too important to expose to "creative" AI behavior, and read-only keeps the surface area small enough to trust.

Keys are revocable instantly. If you suspect a key is compromised, or you're rotating off a device, go to Settings → API Keys → Revoke. Any tool using that key loses access on the next request. Create a new key, rotate, move on.

One key per device is the right pattern. It costs you nothing and gives you clean revocation. If your laptop disappears, you don't have to reconfigure your work setup or your phone or your teammate's machine.

Don't paste keys into chats you'll save. If you ask an AI to set up the integration for you, your key will live in that chat history. After setup, rotate it — create a fresh key in Pinion, update your config, revoke the original. It's two minutes of work for real peace of mind.

The bigger point

Pinion's dashboard and reports are designed to give you a clear, structured view of your portfolio — the metrics, the trends, the breakdowns you reach for most often. They're the right tool for the questions you ask all the time, and they're built to make those answers immediate.

The MCP extends that foundation rather than replacing it. The dashboard is optimized for the questions Pinion knows you'll ask; the MCP is optimized for the ones we couldn't anticipate. Together they cover the full range — at-a-glance for the standard views, conversational for everything else.

That flexibility changes which questions you're willing to ask. When checking concentration takes thirty seconds instead of fifteen minutes, you check it more often. When pre-call prep is a single prompt instead of a research project, you actually do it. When investor update synthesis happens automatically, you stop letting PDFs pile up unread.

The five tools the Pinion MCP exposes are deliberately narrow — they read the same data your dashboard renders, just through a different surface. But narrow tools combined with a flexible interrogator add up to something that complements the dashboard nicely: closer to having a junior analyst who can answer the questions in between the standard reports. Get it connected, then spend a week asking it the questions you've been meaning to answer. You'll find a few that change how you manage the book.