Omnisearch is building the future of search. Our software is able to find information inside any type of content just as easily as in text. We support everything from video and audio to documents, presentations, plain text, and more. Unlike B2C search engines such as Google, we focus on B2B, helping companies organize and search their content, either internally or on their site.
Tell us about yourself?
As a kid growing up in Croatia, I was really into math. After starting high school, I got into programming and competed in algorithmic competitions. In college, I had my first real experience in the tech industry when I got an internship at Facebook, where I worked on spam filters.
After that, I interned at a database unicorn called MemSQL (since rebranded to SingleStore) and later joined full-time. After this, I spent about three years at Amazon, working on Amazon Web Services and Alexa, the intelligent assistant. I then decided it was time to do something on my own and went into the startup world.
I think the main motivation for me to go into tech was the desire to create something new that could make a positive impact in the world. It also helps that, compared to most other lines of work, it’s fairly easy to see the fruits of your effort and use that to motivate yourself.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Focus on customers even more, and be more aggressive in sales. From a personal standpoint, make sure to prioritize your health and don’t overdo the startup grind.
What problem does your business solve?
Our business solves the problem of searching non-textual data. The problem with traditional search technology is that it’s been designed from the ground up with a primary focus on textual data. Yet the percentage of textual data both on the web and inside companies has been in a very steady decline since its peak in 2005. With this, we believe the time has come for a different paradigm.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Our business was inspired by an old and annoying problem I was hitting consistently during my time at Amazon – not being able to find information inside video training materials. Both of my teams were in fairly technically complex spaces, and you often had to look up information inside videos with dense technical content.
Now, this didn’t really work. You could find a video by its title, description, or other such metadata, but finding anything _inside_ it was a nightmare. My co-founder, Matej, and I figured that there are a lot of different companies in the world facing the exact same problem, and we decided to go all-in on developing this idea.
What is your magic sauce?
Our groundbreaking algorithms are able to extract all the relevant information from any content type and make it as easily searchable as text. Whether it’s video, audio, documents, presentations, or plain text, we’re able to make the content searchable completely out of the box with no extra information required from the customer.
To give a more illustrative example, imagine being able to find exact moments in videos where something is mentioned or even where an object or person appears. This is our most differentiated functionality, but we complement this with more traditional search in documents and plain text, so we’re truly a one-stop shop for all of a company’s search needs.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We want to be the most innovative and cutting-edge search company in the world. Our goal is to become the de facto standard for enterprise and site search and to be used by thousands of companies all around the world, including Fortune 500’s.
We’re also super excited about the new developments in artificial intelligence, including large language models such as GPT-3, and we’re constantly thinking about how these breakthroughs can be leveraged to change the way we do information and knowledge retrieval.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Our biggest challenge was finding our initial customers. We had a couple of hypotheses on who could find our initial audio/video-focused solution useful, but it took us a while to actually close some deals. We eventually decided to focus on the EdTech space. Not only is our software a natural fit for them, given their combination of content types, ranging from video to text to presentations, but we also care deeply about education as a fundamental building block of society.
Getting our initial customers in the vertical was not easy, but we were lucky to get introduced to Thinkific and get our initial exposure through their platform. It definitely helped get the ball rolling.
How can people get involved?
Check out our website at www.omnisearch.ai and book a free demo. If you’re a company with lots of non-textual content and either you or your end users have trouble navigating it, we’d love to explore how we can help.