Searchable.ai, developers of a new personalized semantic search engine for your work, announced today that it has closed $2M in seed funding led by Defy Partners. Notable investors and entrepreneurs also participated including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak and Lola; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics, Answers.io, and Digits; 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, founder and Chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship; Eric Dobkin, founder and chairman emeritus of Goldman Sachs Global Equity Capital Markets; and global investment firm Susquehanna International Group.
Searchable.ai is founded by a team with deep machine learning and AI experience. Co-founder and CEO Brian Shin, a serial entrepreneur and experienced technology investor, is a veteran of eight venture-backed startups and an investor in over 50 technology companies. Shin has a background in information retrieval and machine learning-driven automated decisioning systems and has co-authored multiple issued analytics patents. Co-founder and CTO Nick Martin and co-founder and Chief Scientist Aaron Sisto most recently founded VentureX, an AI research and advisory firm. Martin and Sisto previously served as senior technologists at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment firm working to advance US national security. Martin has led high-profile data science initiatives across the Fortune 100, and Sisto was a research fellow at the DOE National Labs while completing a Ph.D. in quantum simulation at Stanford University. Co-founder and CMO Hung Nguyen most recently co-founded media analytics firm Ozmotik, which was acquired by Onclusive. Nguyen previously served as SVP Product at Visible Measures, which utilized machine learning to automate advertising audience segmentation and real-time advertising pricing.
Shin commented, “We feel very privileged to have this opportunity to build something from nothing to address a massive problem that we look forward to sharing in more detail soon. I honestly thought that after eight startups, my time as an entrepreneur was over. For a while now, I was on the investment side looking at startups from the outside while reminiscing about the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey. The strength of our founding team, the magnitude of the opportunity we are addressing, and the support of Neil and Defy spurred us to pull together as a team and go for it.
Neil Sequeira, co-founder of Defy Partners added, “I have known Brian for over a decade so when he told me what he and the team were working on, we knew that we wanted to be involved. Defy prides itself on being a true early-stage venture capital firm ideally positioned to support ambitious startups like Searchable.ai. We especially love it when we can back founders that we know well!”
About Searchable.ai
Searchable.ai is building a new kind of personalized semantic search engine for your work. The company is based out of San Francisco, CA and is currently operating in stealth mode.
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