David Yan’s Findo AI startup raises $4 million

PanARMENIAN.Net - Findo, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that’s setting out to help people find information buried in documents, files, email attachments, and more, has announced a $3 million funding round from Flint Capital, with an additional $1 million expected from a handful of “well-known” Silicon Valley angel investors, VentureBeat reports.

The news comes six weeks after the company announced a $3 million seed funding round from Russian language-based document recognition software giant Abbyy, an announcement that coincided with the launch of Findo’s new product.

The founder and director of the board of Abbyy is Davíd Yang (David Yan), an Armenian-born Russian Ph.D. in Mathematics.

In a nutshell, Findo is an intelligent assistant currently available for iPhone and the web, with more platforms to follow in the coming months. The apps make it easier for users to search locally stored files or connect their cloud-based accounts from Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Box, Gmail, Exchange, Outlook, and others, to unearth information — even if they can only remember vague details. While it will work with traditional keyword searches, it also promises natural language processing (NLP) smarts, meaning users will be able to searching using terms such as: “phone number of that guy I met in London” or “Word document sent by Bob last Monday.” There are also accompanying Findo search bots that integrate with Slack, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Skype.

The product, as it stands, is technically a beta iteration, but in time the company says users will be able to search based on the content within audio and image files too, VentureBeat reports.

Alongside the funding news, the company has lifted the lid on a new feature called Predictive Insights, which is designed to “solve information overload,” or “infobesity,” as the company more succinctly puts it. In short, this new feature serves to “remind” users of a time-sensitive task that’s been sent to them by email which they may have overlooked. Findo will identify that a request has been made by someone important by “ranking” your contacts, and identifies requests made within those emails (e.g. “finish that report by next Friday”) that have not yet been replied to. Findo will automatically send an alert to Slack, Facebook Messenger, or Skype when it’s time.