A dossier is a research brief on one company, assembled before you speak to them. It reads the way a good analyst’s notes read: specific, dated, sourced, and honest about what it could not find out.
Scout does not qualify anybody. Nexus decides who is worth talking to; Scout prepares you for the conversation once that decision is made.
What a dossier is#
It is not a company profile page and it is not a news digest. Three properties separate it from both.
- Every claim is cited. Same rule as the rest of the system — no source, no claim. See the rule.
- It is written toward a conversation. The organising question is “what do I need to know before I speak to this person”, not “what is there to say about this company”.
- It states what it does not know. The open-questions section is not a disclaimer; it is the most directly useful part of the document on a first call.
Requesting one#
A-tier accounts get a dossier automatically when they qualify. Everything else is on request, from the account view, from a calendar event, or over the API.
curl -X POST https://api.arvyn.io/v1/dossiers \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ARVYN_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"account_id": "ACC-19022",
"focus": "operations",
"meeting_at": "2026-08-12T14:00:00Z"
}'focus steers depth, not scope: an operations focus digs harder into sites, headcount and process, a finance focus into filings and cost structure. meeting_at makes the dossier prioritise anything dated close to that meeting, and is what lets Sonar pick the document up automatically.
Sections of a dossier#
The structure is fixed. A fixed structure means you learn where to look, and it means a missing section is visible as an absence rather than hidden by a reflowed layout.
- 01
What they do
The business as it actually operates, not as the homepage describes it. Revenue model, delivery model, who pays.
- 02
What changed recently
Every dated event in the last two quarters, with sources. This is the section that decides whether the call is timely.
- 03
Who owns the problem
The function, the person if identifiable, how long they have been in post, and what they said publicly since arriving.
- 04
How they buy
Procurement signals: tender history, published vendor lists, contract lengths, whether decisions look centralised.
- 05
What they already use
Incumbent tools where publicly evidenced, with the source and how old the evidence is.
- 06
Open questions
What could not be established. Explicitly listed, because an unanswered question is the best thing to ask on the call.
Sections 02 and 06 are the two most people read first, and correctly so. Section 02 tells you whether the timing is real. Section 06 tells you what to ask.
Sourcing rules#
Scout draws on the same source hierarchy as evidence, with three additional rules that apply to research specifically.
| Rule | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Public sources only | Nothing behind a login the workspace does not own. No scraped private profiles, no purchased personal data. |
| Person-level research is role-scoped | What someone has said publicly in their professional capacity. Not their personal accounts, their history outside work, or anything inferred about them. |
| Conflicts are shown, not resolved | Where two sources disagree — a headcount, a location, a role — the dossier prints both with their dates rather than picking one silently. |
| Absence is reported | If a section could not be established, it says so. It does not fill with adjacent material that reads like an answer. |
Freshness#
A dossier is stamped with the date every claim in it was observed, not just the date it was generated. Two dossiers on the same company a month apart will differ, and the diff is available.
| Age | State | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| 0–14 days | Current | Used as-is by Sonar and by campaign generation |
| 15–45 days | Ageing | Sonar warns before a practice session; a refresh is offered |
| Over 45 days | Stale | Regenerated automatically before use, with the diff attached |
Refreshing is cheap relative to being wrong on a call about something that changed three weeks ago. If a meeting is booked more than a fortnight out, request the dossier close to the meeting rather than close to the booking.
Handing off to Sonar#
This is the part of the product the founder likes most, and it is worth understanding because it changes what a dossier is for.
A dossier is not only reading material. Hand it to Sonar’s practice room and it becomes a buyer: someone who knows what that company knows, has the constraints that company has, and raises the objections that company’s situation would actually produce. You can rehearse the specific call, against the specific company, before you take it.
{
"dossier_id": "DOS-1188",
"account_id": "ACC-19022",
"handed_to": "sonar",
"session_type": "practice",
"persona": {
"role": "Head of Operations",
"tenure_days": 41,
"constraints": ["second depot opening", "no dedicated ops tooling budget line"],
"grounded_in": ["EV-2291", "EV-2308", "DOS-1188#02", "DOS-1188#04"]
},
"open_questions": 3
}grounded_in is the guarantee that matters. The rehearsal buyer is built from cited material, so the objections you practise against are the ones the evidence supports — not objections a language model finds it plausible to invent.
Next: Sonar’s live coach.