INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise
The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round.Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants, including Paul
English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft,
president and COO of the Kraft Group and the New England Patriots; MIT Prof
Edward Roberts; Eric Dobkin, founder and chairman emeritus of Goldman Sachs Global Equity Capital Markets; and Susquehanna International
Group.The prestigious group of investors saw that Searchable.ai is trying to solve a big problem around findability
Company co-founder Brian Shin says that knowledge workers have been struggling for years trying to find a way to better utilize all of the
information that exists within an organization.“The problem we’re really solving is that there are a trillion documents created every
year in Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc., and it’s really difficult if you’re a knowledge worker to find what you need in terms of
either a document, an asset like a slide or worksheet within a document or the actual answer to a question that you have,” Shin said.The
questioning part could be particularly valuable because it lets you ask a natural language question and find a specific piece of information
within a document, rather than just the document itself
“Let’s say you have a giant spreadsheet, you could actually ask a question of all your spreadsheets and find the atomic unit of
knowledge that you’re actually looking for,” he said.The product itself is not quite ready for the big reveal, but if it works as
described, it will be a huge boost to knowledge workers who have continually struggled to find a nugget of information they know is out
there across the myriad documents in an organization.Shin is an experienced entrepreneur who has helped launch and sell three companies
He reports he has raised $100 million in venture capital and most recently has worked as a venture capitalist himself, but he saw this
opportunity and decided to jump back into the development side of things.He admits he’s giving up a lot to go back to the startup
lifestyle, but he and his co-founders decided this was worth it
“You know the draw, the compulsion to do another startup is is really what this is about
So my three other colleagues and I have have all started companies before and we’re all giving up big jobs to do this, and I’m so
excited about the team and the massive opportunity.”He promised more details about the company and the solution would be coming early next
