A new app called Weavit wants to be a “Shazam for your thoughts” — that is, it wants to offer people a different way to quickly capture their thoughts in a note-taking tool with the press of a button, which are then matched to other content in a broader knowledge base. Currently, Weavit can link your notes to your contacts, meetings, topics and other weblinks, allowing you to jot down your ideas and other inspiration without having to try to first organize those thoughts in some more structured way.
The startup’s founders believe this parallels how your brain already works.
“Every thought that we have in our mind, sometimes, is completely unstructured and simply does not fit within an existing note that we have,” explains Weavit co-founder Komal Narwani. “You just want to throw a thought out there, and you want the machine to do the organization for you — so you can surface that information at a later stage and have it all neatly organized.”
To use the app, you can either type or dictate your idea to enter it into Weavit’s database.
The app then uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to link certain items within the note to people, places, events and other topics it knows about. For instance, if you wrote down you met someone at a certain event, like CES, then “CES” would be identified as an event and linked to other content where “CES” was also included. (Weavit connects to more than 60 million Wikipedia topics to aid in these sorts of connections.) Plus, the person in your note could be identified and linked to their company, to past locations or meetings, and more.
Image Credits: Weavit
This automated form of linking makes it easier for people to build on their own existing knowledge as they write down their ideas. However, Weavit will also support using common tools, like the hashtag or the @ mention, so its users can make more manual connections as needed.
Weavit’s co-founder, Emmanuel Lefort, came up with the idea for the note-taking app in his past life working at a bank. The bank was tasked with selling financial products to its clients, but the sales staff wasn’t fully able to take advantage of latent information that resided within people’s personal networks. He thought it would be interesting if there was a way to automatically connect information, automatically, without requiring manual entry into a CRM.
At launch, Weavit isn’t yet at the stage of connecting its users’ content to others across a distributed network of some kind — like within an internal organization, perhaps; that’s more of a long-term goal.
Instead, everything recorded in your Weavit app is private and encrypted. (Data is also encrypted while in transit, we’re told.)
Currently, Weavit is iOS only, and only available to users with an access code, as the startup is still in the early phases of testing.
TechCrunch readers who want to try the app can use the code “braincrunch.”
Image Credits: Weavit
Narwani says Weavit could fill a niche by being a more approachable app amid other tools powered by or resembling graph databases, like Roam Research or Obsidian, which are Markdown-based knowledge management tools. While those productivity apps are more complex and powerful, that also means they’re more complicated to adopt — especially for everyday users who aren’t as technical. Weavit, on the other hand, could be used by anyone for jotting down notes not only about their work or their research, but for remembering, organizing and connecting everyday bits of information — like movie recommendations, the names of your kids’ teachers or websites on a particular subject you want to save for later.
The startup raised a $1.25 million seed round in 2020, led by Fluxus Ventures, and is a team of six full-time, based in Hong Kong.
Though the app’s MVP had been live last year, the app was retooled and relaunched in December 2021, based on user feedback. In other words, the version of the app live now is only a few weeks old. In its first 10 days on the App Store, the new version of Weavit gained 1,500 sign-ups, the company claims.
The Weavit team is also working on a web app and will soon launch a Chrome extension for capturing images and web pages while browsing, to make Weavit capable of collecting content from the web — not just your own thoughts, ideas and inspirations. An Android app is further down the road.