Node
San Francisco-based startup Node wants to change that.
Led by founder and CEO Falon Fatemi, Node emerged from stealth on Tuesday ready to take on its lofty goal of changing the way we discover information. By using AI to connect you or your business with the right opportunity at the right time, Node wants to "accelerate serendipity" on the web.
Node's patent-pending technology works by indexing people, places, products, and companies instead of web pages, and using this data to connect customers to opportunities. So far, it has half a billion profiles. The AI understands the relationships between people and companies, and can marry its data layer with a customer's personal data.
Node is currently integrated with Salesforce, and customers can ask questions like "What company will be most interested in my product?" Node will tell the customer who or what they need to connect with, why it came up with that answer, and even what to say to make the most of the opportunity. It's searching without using a search box.
"Search is really great when you know what you're looking for, but we're living in a world where there is more information created in a single day than in the past 90 years," said Fatemi.
Node's recent funding includes $10.8 million of Series A funding led by Avalon Ventures with participation from Mark Cuban, NEA, and Canaan Partners; Node has raised $16.3 million in funding overall. Fatemi says the purpose of staying in stealth was meant to demonstrate the power of the technology before the official launch. So far, Node has made over $100 million in customer revenue and identified $4 billion in revenue for businesses and marketers.
Fatemi is the daughter of two generations of serial entrepreneurs: her parents and her grandmother. She became Google's youngest employee at the age of 19 while taking a full load of undergrad classes. While there, she worked on global expansion and strategic partnerships before working as a consultant in the startup world.
Node was the result of a personal project of Fatemi's. She decided do an analysis of all the introductions she'd made between friends and colleagues over the past five years to see what kind of outcomes had taken place. She emailed people in her network, saying hello and asking if anything had come of the introduction she had facilitated between them and someone else. She found that her introductions had led to millions of dollars of investments, sales and partnerships.
"I was acting as the node within my own network facilitating opportunities with the right people at the right time" she said.
Right now, Node is focusing on establishing itself in the sales and marketing space, working with businesses to find potential revenue sources, but Fatemi sees a world where Node's technology can be used for almost everything - even something as personal (and complicated) as dating.
Take for example, an app like Tinder. The way it's currently set up, in order to find a potential match you have to swipe through hundreds of profiles, absorbing the data on each person before deciding if he or she is the one you're looking for. Node could eliminate that entire process by taking the information it knows about you (education background, interests, age, etc.), finding that perfect someone within their data graph, setting you up with a date, or several. You can know exactly why the people it chose are compatible with you, and as an added bonus, it might tell you what to say to them.
If Fatemi has her way, Node will be the intelligence layer of the internet, making sense of everyone and thing - even your next date.