There’s always something cool coming out of Y Combinator, but even so Greplin stands out from the crowd. It’s a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud. If you’ve used desktop search like spotlight, you’ll get Greplin right away. It’s like spotlight for your cloud data.
It’s dead simple to use. Sign up and authorize any number of social services for Greplin to index – I signed into Facebook, Twitter and Google Voice to start. After a few minutes of indexing time Greplin then presents you with a Google-like search box. Run a query and find the public and private data you’ve locked away on those sites. Tweets, including DMs, are shown, as well as Facebook messages and Google Voice voicemail transcriptions and SMS. You can also index Gmail, Dropbox, LinkedIn and a bunch of other services.
After you use it for the first time you’ll understand that you’ll never not use it again. And there are nice touches like showing real time results as you type. And Greplin only uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party site credentials.
Greplin will be free for most of what they do, and charge a fee for more features like searching inside of attachments.
And the story behind the company is just as compelling. It was founded by Daniel Gross when he was 18 (he’s all of 19 now). Daniel, a dual U.S./Israeli citizen, lived in Jerusalem his entire life until moving to California to go through the Y Combinator incubator period this last winter. The original inspiration for Greplin? Says Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham: “He was on his way to a party, and he didn’t remember where the address was stored. Was it a Facebook event, or in an email, or in his calendar? It was a pain to try searching all these things from his phone.” So he built the solution.
Joining Gross as cofounder is Robby Walker, founder of Y Combinator and Google-acquired company Zenter. This is Walker’s second trip through Y Combinator, and Gross is the youngest entrepreneur Y Combinator has funded to date.
Investors are salivating. The company has already raised over $700,000 in angel funding from SV Angel, Chris Dixon, Bret Taylor, Keith Rabois and Paul Buchheit. Bret Taylor’s experience with grabbing data from lots of third party services at FriendFeed is particularly valuable, says Gross.
Keep an eye on this one. They are going to be turning down acquisition offers left and right. They’ve just attacked the other half of web search.
Cue (formerly Greplin) is a free service that helps people make the most of their day. Cue intelligently ties together and surfaces useful information at the right time from the accounts they use most, including email, contacts, and calendar. People can see their entire day at a glance or simultaneously search across all of their accounts with Cue.
Daniel Gross the founder of Greplin - a personal search engine that indexes user’s cloud data. He is Y-Combinator’s first Israeli and youngest entrepreneur at 18.
Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...
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