Choosing your lens

Pick the lens that matches what you're trying to do, and see which plans include which lenses.

3 min readLast updated Sep 28, 2026

A lens decides what OmniLead searches for and how the app adapts around it: the search filters, the templates, the empty states and the widgets on your home screen. Your CRM, inbox and contacts stay the same whichever lens you're in.

If you're on the Free plan, you choose one lens during onboarding. Starter includes two lenses, and Growth and Agency include all four. This page helps you choose.

Start from your goal

Ask one question: who do you need to reach in the next 30 days?

If you need to…	Start with	Why
Raise a pre-seed, seed or Series A round	Investors	Funds and partners from SEC Form D filings, filtered by stage, check size and sector
Sell a product or service to businesses	Leads	Companies and decision-makers, with emails found on public pages
Find collaborators, advisors or expert survey respondents	Researchers	Authors ranked by what they publish now, linked to ORCID and their works
Fund research or an early-stage deep-tech company	Grants	Open opportunities from Grants.gov, NIH and NSF, with deadlines and past awardees

Leads

Choose Leads if you sell to companies. You search by industry, company size, location and job title, and OmniLead finds the people who decide. Emails come from the company's own public pages, or are ranked from the email pattern the company really uses. Every one is verified before you send.

Good fit for agencies, B2B founders doing their own sales, and sales teams who want a source for every contact. Read Finding leads.

Investors

Choose Investors if you're raising. When a fund raises money from its own investors, it files a Form D with the SEC. OmniLead reads those filings to build fund profiles with the partners listed, the fund's size and how recently it filed, then adds stage and sector from the fund's own website.

Good fit for founders raising their first institutional round, and for anyone who wants a list of active funds with the filing linked for each one. Read Finding investors.

Researchers

Choose Researchers if you need people with specific expertise. You search a topic, such as "solid-state battery", and see who is publishing on it now, with institution, country, publication count and recency. Profiles link to the researcher's ORCID record and their works.

Good fit for university spin-outs, R&D teams looking for collaborators, and anyone recruiting experts for interviews or surveys. Read Finding researchers.

Grants

Choose Grants if you're looking for non-dilutive funding. OmniLead searches open opportunities from Grants.gov, NIH and NSF in one place. Deadlines you save become tasks in your pipeline, and past awardees show you who has won similar funding before.

Good fit for researchers, labs, nonprofits and deep-tech startups eligible for SBIR and STTR programs. Read Finding grants.

Which plans include which lenses

Plan	Lenses included
Free	One lens of your choice, picked at onboarding
Starter	Leads and Investors
Growth	All four: Leads, Investors, Researchers and Grants
Agency	All four

Lenses that aren't in your plan are still visible in the lens switcher with a small lock. Click one to see a preview with example results (labelled Example), what the lens is good for and the plan that includes it. Nothing is hidden, and nothing blocks what you're already doing.

Preview panel for a lens that isn't in the current plan, with example rows and an Upgrade to Growth button — A locked lens shows a preview with example results and the plan that includes it.

Changing your mind later

On Free, you can change your lens once every 30 days in Settings → Lenses. See Switching lenses.
On Starter, Growth and Agency, switch between included lenses at any time with the lens switcher or ⌘ 1 – 4.

Leads you already saved stay in your CRM when you change lens. They keep the tag of the lens they came from.

The lens switcher popover listing Leads, Investors, Researchers and Grants with shortcuts