Needl, a Seattle startup constructing a private search product that pulls data from throughout totally different net apps, raised $2.5 million.
The corporate, which simply graduated from Y Combinator, goals to assist folks shortly discover information, paperwork, or messages.
“We’ve basically constructed a single search bar in your complete life,” stated CEO Max Keenan. “It’s principally Mac’s Highlight on steroids.”
Keenan began the corporate with fellow College of Chicago alums James Liu and Angela Liu, each former software program engineers at Microsoft.
Needl goals to serve three forms of searches:
- Discovering particular information or paperwork
- Discovering details about a selected class or topic
- Discovering related data about an individual or firm
Keenan stated mission managers are the preliminary major target market for Needl, which launched a closed beta in August and is rolling out to extra customers this week. Right here’s how he described the use case in an e mail to Startup:
One other instance (and one of the frequent), one in all our customers is a PM. Forward of each one in all her calls, she makes use of Needl to look the Venture Identify and from there, she immediately has the related shows in Slides, the most recent specs in Notion, and the tickets in Jira. As a substitute of spending 10 minutes monitoring down the related data, she has all the things proper at her fingertips with a single search.
There are a number of corporations that provide search-related capabilities, together with Glean, which raised $100 million earlier this yr.
Keenan, a former funding banker, stated Glean makes “nice inner search” however is focused at enterprises.
“We discovered that discovering data is tough, even at small corporations, so we’re constructing a self-serve instrument that anybody can get getting into lower than two minutes and from there, discover something they want, no matter the place it lives,” he stated. “Needl doesn’t require full firm buy-in, in contrast to most of our predecessors.”
Different related startups embrace Command E, which raised $4.3 million in 2020, and Seattle-based Plus, which raised $5.5 million final yr.
Needl’s traders embrace Fuse, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Stanford professor Collin Wallace, and SimpleLegal founder Nathan Wenzel.