Google, DuckDuckGo, and different search engines like google and yahoo provide help to discover data from the net. However it’s laborious to seek out paperwork, messages, conferences, and emails from your individual accounts. You have to go to completely different functions to seek out issues that is perhaps associated to 1 venture. A Y-Combinator-backed app referred to as Needl helps customers with that.
Needl is a cross-platform software that allows you to search throughout your native filesystem and accounts like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Notion, and Slack. The free model — accessible on the internet, Home windows, and Mac — helps you to join a single account per integration. In case you want extra account connections and integrations like Jira and Linear, you’ll need to pay $10 per thirty days.
The applying is straightforward to arrange and use: as soon as you put in it in your system, it is going to ask you to attach your Google, Slack, and Notion accounts. As soon as that’s executed, you may seek for information, occasions, emails, and different issues throughout all these accounts and your native filesystem. You possibly can filter these outcomes by information, messages, occasions, duties, and emails.
Picture Credit: Needl
In case you’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 bounce to the house view. The default view on the app reveals the Exercise Feed, which can present you contextual data on completely different apps equivalent to your upcoming assembly.
Needl founders Max Keenan, Angela Liu, and James Liu are all Chicago college alums and met at a hackathon. They labored on a couple of facet tasks like a software to write down essays utilizing GPT-2 and a TikTok for weblog posts. After college, MaxKeenan in funding banking at Moelis whereas Angela Liu and James Liu joined Microsoft.
The trio mentioned that they needed to turn into organized as soon as they joined their jobs and meticulously observe naming programs and folder constructions to simply discover data. They needed to unravel this downside of regularly and manually reorganizing data by way of 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 just about through the pandemic, it hit us proper within the face — data was siloed throughout all of those completely different platforms and we may enhance the search and discovery of information,” Keenan mentioned in an electronic mail dialog with TechCrunch.
Picture Credit: Needl
Needl staff 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 numerous buyers together with Fuse, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Collin Wallace and Nathan Wenzel.
The corporate rolled out the product underneath a closed beta to round 200 customers in August. Now the corporate is making it accessible to everybody underneath public beta.
Keenan mentioned the corporate needs to concentrate on bettering its contextual and semantic search by way of 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 considered one of its main opponents. In Might, Glean raised $100 million in its series C funding round led by Sequoia with participation from Lightspeed, Basic 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 setup time for the latter.
“Largest distinction from Glean is that our product is self-serve and may be arrange in underneath 2 minutes by anybody, no matter firm dimension. Glean sells by way of 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 gives search options by way of app integrations. Nonetheless, it’s accessible solely in the U.S. with European expansion underway.
Keenan mentioned in long run, Needl needs to pre-empt the necessity for search and current data by way of its personal advice engine.
