Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Searchable.ai is an early-stage startup in the alpha phase of testing its initial product, but it has an idea compelling enough to attract investment, even during a pandemic. Today the company announced an additional $4 million in seed capital to continue building its AI-driven search solution.

Susquehanna International Group and Omicron Media co-led the round, with participation by Defy Partners, NextView Ventures and a group of unnamed angel investors. Today’s investment comes on top of the $2 million in seed money the startup announced in October.

Company co-founder and CEO Brian Shin said that when he presented to his investors in early March at the last event he attended before everything shut down, they approached him about additional money, and given the economic uncertainty, he decided to take it.

“Honestly we probably would not have taken additional money if it was not for the uncertainty around the macro environment right now,” he told TechCrunch.

The company is trying to solve enterprise search and, being pre-revenue, Shin recognized that having additional capital would give them more room to build the product and get it to market.

“We are trying to solve this problem where people just can’t find information that they need in order to do their jobs. When you look within the workplace, this problem is just getting worse and worse with the proliferation of different formats and people storing their information in many different places, local networks, cloud repositories, email and Slack,” he explained.

They have a few thousand people in the alpha program right now testing a personal desktop version of the application that helps individual users find their content wherever it happens to be. The plan is to open that up to a wider group soon.

The road map calls for a teams version, where groups of employees can search among their different individual repositories; a developer version to build the search technology into other operations; and eventually an enterprise tool. They also want to add voice search starting with an Alexa skill, with the general belief that we need to move beyond keyword searches to more natural language approaches.

“We believe that there’ll be a whole new category of search, search companies and search products that are more conversational. […] Being able to interact with your information more naturally, more and more conversationally, that’s where we think the market is going,” he said.

The company now has more money in the bank to help achieve that vision.

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 year.