Agolo: Making Government Sales and Landing VC Money
April 4, 2022
Apple, Google, and Microsoft might be search experts, but they continue to get things wrong. These are big companies, so they cannot solely concentrate on the search function like a dedicated company. Tech Crunch explains how Agolo specializes in search and improves upon what the tech giants do: “Agolo Summary-Powered Search Brings In Government Work And Fresh Funding.”
Agolo developed a powerful summary search engine that dissects articles and presents users with shorter versions that preserve key points. Agolo identified two types of search tools: dumb and smart. Dumb engines are not good at locating context or extraction data, while the smart functions are decent at fining relevance and order items. Both are limited in their capabilities. Agolo designed a smarter search function and described it as this:
“Agolo co-founder and CEO Sage Wohns gave the example of searching for ibuprofen. Any ordinary search engine only understands ibuprofen as a term people generally search for in order to learn more about the medicine, and that’s the way it’s reflected in the index. Even if you deploy that search tech on a domain-specific corpus, like research papers, it doesn’t magically gain better understanding. But a medical researcher searching through pandemic-related papers for ibuprofen already knows what it is — what they need is an ordered presentation of how ibuprofen appears in the literature, what other drugs and effects it is most tightly correlated with, what institutions and authors are associated with studying it.”
Agolo digests terabytes of data and summaries them in usable knowledge graphs. The summary search tool is capable of handling long documents and the US federal government uses it. Agolo does not sell an out of the box search solution, instead it partners with enterprise system designers like Google and Microsoft. This is interesting because in a recent round of funding, Google and Microsoft invested in Agolo:
“The company’s A round was just closed, led by Lytical Ventures, plus returning investors Microsoft M12, Google’s Assistant Investment Group, Tensility Venture Partners, Ridgeline Partners and Thomson Reuters. The company has raised over $18 million in total to date.”
Agolo, like Kyndi, are examples of a mini-enterprise search renascence? The memories of Autonomy, Delphi, Entopia, and Fast Search & Transfer have faded from customers’, investors’, and innovators’ memories.
Whitney Grace, April 4, 2022
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
