Prof. Qingchen Wang and Prof. Stefano Ermon
As AI professors, we'd both previously co-founded AI startups. Neither of us had prior business operations experience, and we quickly realized that (1) even for the most technical startups, a tremendous amount of operations work must be done for the company to become successful; and (2) the work is manual and incredibly laborious. We spent too many hours scouring the web for potential customers, suppliers, competitors, and investors—creating and evaluating lists of hundreds of candidates every time we needed something!
The reality is there are over 50 million companies in the world. If your goal is to find companies that are suitable customers, suppliers, or investors, you're essentially looking for needles in a haystack. Today, you probably start with some idea of what you're looking for, do a Google search to find some companies or online lists that might be relevant, read through the results, refine your search, read through more results, and eventually land on a few good candidates. With this approach, you probably spend 1-2 hours to find a handful of good candidates, and then move onto something else.
We later learned that sophisticated professionals such as Business Development Representatives (BDRs) leverage existing tools to research companies. Some of what we've seen include Apollo.io, Clay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and a few others. It turns out, these tools are essentially databases that store the 50 million companies, but you still have to manually go through them to find what you need, and that will still take endless hours.
In late 2023, we decided to challenge our AI expertise—can we build a search engine that can reliably sift through the 50 million companies in the world to discover exactly what you're looking for? With it, instead of spending 1-2 hours to find a handful of good candidates, you'd find 1,000s of good candidates in a single search! By mid-2024, we've proven to ourselves that it's possible to do so, as our search engine already significantly outperforms the best alternatives. Moreover, we've only scratched the surface with the power of our AI, and expect to 100x its capability in the coming years. We'd love for you to give it a try!
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