Orth Inc
05/06/2026 | News release | Archived content
Happenstance: Search Your Network with AI for Sales, Hiring & Fundraising
Cold outreach has a 2% response rate. Warm intros convert at 40%. The difference is your network, but most people barely use it. You know someone who knows the perfect candidate, investor, or buyer. You just don't know that you know.
Today we're excited to announce our partnership with Happenstance, a network search engine that lets you search your connections with AI, now available on Orthogonal. Happenstance connects to your email, calendar, LinkedIn, and other platforms to make your entire professional network searchable with natural language.
What is Happenstance?
Happenstance indexes your connections across Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Outlook into one searchable graph. Ask it anything: "Who do I know at Stripe?", "Find me engineers in my network who've worked at fintech startups", or "Who can intro me to Series A investors in SF?" It searches not just the people you know directly, but the people they know.
Loved by 400,000+ users, Happenstance turns your existing relationships into your unfair advantage.
Key Features
Person Research
Get deep background research on anyone: their recent posts, hiring history, career trajectory, areas of expertise, and how you're connected. Feed in a name, company, title, or social handle and Happenstance pulls together a comprehensive profile.
Using Happenstance with Orthogonal
Happenstance's research API is available on Orthogonal. Give your agent a name, company, title, or social handle and get back a comprehensive professional profile.
Research a Person
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// Using @orth/sdk // Install: npm install @orth/sdk import Orthogonal from "@orth/sdk"; const orthogonal = new Orthogonal({ apiKey: process.env.ORTHOGONAL_API_KEY, }); // Start a research request const research = await orthogonal.run({ api: "happenstance", path: "/v1/research", method: "POST", body: { description: "Garry Tan Y Combinator" } }); console.log(research); // Returns: { id: "research_abc123", url: "https://happenstance.ai/research/..." }
Get Research Results
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// Poll for results (research runs asynchronously) let profile; while (true) { profile = await orthogonal.run({ api: "happenstance", path: `/v1/research/${research.id}`, method: "GET" }); if (profile.status === "COMPLETED") break; await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 2000)); } console.log(profile); // Returns: background summary, recent activity, career history, // expertise areas, mutual connections, and more
Using x402 Protocol
Happenstance on Orthogonal supports x402 for autonomous agent payments using USDC stablecoins.
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// Install: npm install x402-fetch viem import { wrapFetchWithPayment } from "x402-fetch"; import { privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts"; const account = privateKeyToAccount(process.env.PRIVATE_KEY); const fetchWithPayment = wrapFetchWithPayment(fetch, account); // Research a person with automatic USDC payment const response = await fetchWithPayment( "https://x402.orth.sh/happenstance/v1/research", { method: "POST", headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" }, body: JSON.stringify({ description: "Garry Tan Y Combinator" }) } ); const data = await response.json(); console.log(data);
Available Endpoints
| Endpoint | Method | Description |
| /v1/research | POST | Start a person research request |
| /v1/research/{research_id} | GET | Get research results |
Use Cases
Sales Prep
Research decision-makers before outreach. Get their career history, recent activity, areas of expertise, and how you're connected. Turn a cold email into a personalized message that shows you've done your homework.
Recruiting
Research candidates before interviews. Pull together their career trajectory, expertise areas, and public activity so your team walks into every conversation with full context.
Investor Research
Research investors before pitching. Understand their background, portfolio companies, and recent activity. When you know who you're talking to, your pitch becomes a conversation.
Meeting Prep
Research anyone before a meeting. Get a comprehensive profile with career history, recent public activity, expertise areas, and how you're connected. Walk into every conversation with context.
Why We Partnered with Happenstance
Before any meeting, call, or outreach, the question is always the same: who am I talking to? Happenstance answers that by pulling together everything about a person across your connected platforms into one comprehensive research profile. Career history, recent activity, expertise, mutual connections. Context that would take hours to gather manually, delivered in seconds through an API call.
For AI agents, this is transformative. An agent preparing for a sales call can research the decision-maker, pulling together career history, recent activity, and mutual connections, all through a single API call. Instead of going in blind, your agent walks you into every conversation with full context on who you're talking to.
Try It Today
Sign up for Orthogonal and get $10 free credits to try Happenstance and dozens of other APIs. One key, hundreds of APIs, pay per request.
Orth Inc published this content on May 06, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on October 06, 2026 at 04:10 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]