Get ready to start hearing a lot about a startup in Seattle called Wavii. There’s been some buzz building about them, mostly leaks from spurned venture capitalists who’ve desperately wanted to invest. And perhaps a spurned corporate dev exec or two from a variety of companies that have tried to acquire the little startup way before it was ready to launch.
So what is Wavii? I don’t know because I haven’t seen it yet. But people who have seen the current alpha say it’s a stunningly original way to approach Natural Language Processing to an index of the web and retrieve highly useful pieces of information. and how that information relates to other information, current and historical.
The team was just a couple of people until just recently. Now they’re up to 5 employees. One team is working on the core NLP problems of accuracy (understanding) and performance (how long it takes to reach understanding). The old Powerset benchmarks were that it took their servers about 1 second to properly index a sentence and turn it into structured, useful information.
When the tech is done, they aren’t going to launch a new search engine like Powerset or Fuil. Instead, we hear, Wavii will automatically creates social content in real-time from news, blogs, and tweets across the web. Utilizing a proprietary piece of core Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, Wavii is able to accurately and performantly understand prose on the web, delivering information in a Facebook-like feed that users can consume like never before.
It sounds exciting! And some others have agreed. Yahoo and “some other big players” have made outright offers to buy the fledgling company before they are even close to launch. Yahoo reportedly offered up to $10 million in cash, but that didn’t get founder Adrian Aoun to change plans, say our sources. More than one Yahoo employee, though, may secretly be an angel investor in the startup.
The company has raised $2 million to date from high profile angel investors. Among others, we believe SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor and Fritz Lanman are all current investors.
Wavii is still in the “sshhh be quiet it’s still baking” period. But in the next few months they’ll start to let a small number of people in to test it out and give Wavii the feedback they need to tweak the product. We may even see them on stage for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt in late September.
Want to work at this super hot startup? They’re hiring! Email: jobs@wavii.com. It’s a plus if you live in Seattle, but it’s not a requirement.