Google, DuckDuckGo and different search engines like google and yahoo allow you to discover data from the net. But it surely’s exhausting to search out paperwork, messages, conferences and emails from your individual accounts. It’s essential go to completely different purposes to search out issues that may be associated to at least one undertaking. A Y Combinator-backed app known as Needl helps customers with that.
Needl is a cross-platform utility that permits you to search throughout your native file system and accounts like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Notion and Slack. The free model — accessible on the internet, Home windows and Mac — permits you to join a single account per integration. For those who want extra account connections and integrations like Jira and Linear, you have to to pay $10 monthly.
The applying is easy to arrange and use: As soon as you put in it in your system, it can ask you to attach your Google, Slack and Notion accounts. As soon as that’s carried out, you’ll be able to seek for information, occasions, emails and different issues throughout all these accounts and your native file system. You’ll be able to filter these outcomes by information, messages, occasions, duties and emails.
Picture Credit: Needl
For those who’re a keyboard ninja, the app has useful shortcuts so that you can launch the interface and navigate round. Customers can customise shortcuts to launch the app and leap to the house view. The default view on the app reveals the Exercise Feed, which is able to present you contextual data on completely different apps reminiscent of your upcoming assembly.
Needl founders Max Keenan, Angela Liu and James Liu are all College of Chicago alums and met at a hackathon. They labored on just a few aspect initiatives like a software to write down essays utilizing GPT-2 and a TikTok for weblog posts. After college, Max Keenan was in funding banking at Moelis whereas Angela Liu and James Liu joined Microsoft.
The trio mentioned that they needed to develop into organized as soon as they joined their jobs and meticulously comply with naming programs and folder buildings to simply discover data. They needed to resolve this downside of regularly and manually reorganizing data by search.
“We have been on the lookout for an issue that traditionally had by no means been solved, however enhancements in language fashions would have the ability to resolve. As we have been onboarding nearly through the pandemic, it hit us proper within the face — data was siloed throughout all of those completely different platforms and we might enhance the search and discovery of information,” Keenan mentioned in an electronic mail dialog with .
Picture Credit: Needl
The Needl crew wrote the primary line of code in June when it was within the Y Combinator’s Summer time 2022 cohort. The corporate has raised $2.5 million from varied buyers together with Fuse, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Collin Wallace and Nathan Wenzel.
The corporate rolled out the product below a closed beta to round 200 customers in August. Now the corporate is making it accessible to everybody below public beta.
Keenan mentioned the corporate needs to give attention to enhancing its contextual and semantic search by giant language fashions (LLM) over the subsequent 12 months. Plus, the startup needs so as to add extra premium integrations like Asana, HubSpot and Salesforce.
The startup considers Glean, a startup powering enterprise search throughout apps, as one among its main opponents. In Might, Glean raised $100 million in its Series C funding round led by Sequoia with participation from Lightspeed, Common Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins and the Slack Fund at a $1 billion valuation post-money.
Keenan mentioned {that a} main differentiation between Glean and Needl is the shorter set-up time for the latter.
“Greatest distinction from Glean is that our product is self-serve and might be arrange in below 2 minutes by anybody, no matter firm measurement. Glean sells by sales-led processes that require full firm adoption, can take months, and are inaccessible to people or small groups,” he mentioned.
Neeva, a search engine constructed by a former Google advert exec, additionally provides search options by app integrations. Nevertheless, it’s accessible solely in the U.S. with European expansion underway.
Keenan mentioned in the long run, Needl needs to pre-empt the necessity for search and current data by its personal suggestion engine.
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