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Fundamental Research Labs

Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera) is an applied AI research company building autonomous, collaborative AI agents, founded by researchers from MIT EECS, the Stanford NLP Group, Google X, and Citadel and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Prosus. Its flagship product, Shortcut, is an AI analyst for Excel that turns natural-language prompts into full spreadsheet models — LBOs, DCFs, three-statement models, waterfalls — and ships a web app, desktop app, Excel and Google Sheets plugins, a ShortcutXL terminal agent (CLI), and a Platform API. The Shortcut Platform API lets teams submit spreadsheet-automation jobs, poll status, download generated workbooks, upload context files, list agent skills, and export organization usage data programmatically using API-key bearer authentication.

agent native

Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Fundamental Research Labs the way a machine reads it — 10 machine-readable artifacts across 3 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Fundamental Research Labs scores 63.7/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 78/100 (agent native). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 63.7/100 · strong
Contract Quality 14.2 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 14.8 / 20
Commercial Clarity 16.8 / 20
Operational Transparency 7.9 / 13
Governance 0.0 / 12
Discoverability 10.0 / 10
Agent readiness — 78/100 · agent native
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 12 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 6 / 6
Agent Skills 5 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile Fundamental Research Labs

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Fundamental Research Labs. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 3

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Fundamental Research Labs Authentication API

API key authentication and verification

Fundamental Research Labs Spreadsheets API

Spreadsheet processing and automation endpoints

Fundamental Research Labs Usage API

Export team usage metrics for reporting, finance, and internal analytics. Usage Metrics in Shortcut provides a prefilled request with your team_id; use this reference to customi...

MCP Servers 1

Model Context Protocol servers expose these APIs directly to AI agents. We profile them because agent-native access is the fastest-growing way this provider's capabilities actually get used.

Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Event Specifications 1

Not every API is request/response. AsyncAPI describes the event-driven and streaming side — the webhooks and channels — so the asynchronous half of the interface is documented the same way the synchronous half is.

AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Fundamental Research Labs Authentication

apiKey/http · 2 schemes

SECURITY

Fundamental Research Labs Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Fundamental Research Labs Agentic Access

10 operations · 3 acting

10 operations · 3 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for Fundamental Research Labs — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 3

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 3

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 4

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Build 3

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 3

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 3

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/fundamental-research-labs · machine-readable index on apis.io