Tech

Agolo summary-driven search brings in new government work and funding – TechCrunch


Searching is hard, but even the good tools developed by Google, Microsoft and others just can’t seem to get it right when navigating thousands of documents and ideas stuck in a business’s database. and government. However, Agolo is creating a specialty of it, using clever briefs to get a foot in the door with the feds – and also raising a few million to keep building.

The last time we spoke with Agolo in the summer of 2019, or as I think about it, last summer. By that time, the company had built a powerful summary engine that could take documents, articles, and other long-form content and create shorter versions while keeping the important points intact. This type of technology is valuable in many ways, but what Agolo sees as immediately applicable is in search.

The problem with search is that the tools that do it are both smart and stupid. They’re smart at finding related strings and sorting things using those metrics (when they’re allowed to), but dumb in that they’re not good at context or extraction. I mean they may or may not be good at drawing out, for example, the author of a page or sheet of paper because the format is so different – and without the ability to connect those pieces of information, those This engine doesn’t really know what’s important.

However, part of summarizing a document is understanding what’s important about it – if not, how do you know which parts to keep or throw away? As it turns out, this information is crucial to making searches of unstructured or miscellaneous data efficient. Docugami focuses on the process of turning documents into data, and Agolo is using a relevant approach to allow users to find direction in the company’s pile of documents.

The company found a good fit with its technology in the early days of the pandemic, as the Office of Science and Technology Policy was looking for better ways to organize the rapidly accumulating data around COVID- 19. Author and content search is all well and good, but people need something a little smarter than regular database indexers.

Agolo co-founder and CEO Sage Wohns gave the example of finding ibuprofen. Any normal search engine just understands ibuprofen as a term people usually search to learn more about the drug and that is how it is reflected in the index. Even if you implement that search technology on a domain-specific corpus, such as research papers, it won’t magically give you insight. But a medical researcher searching through the pandemic-related literature for ibuprofen already knows what it is — what they need is an orderly presentation of how ibuprofen appears in the literature, the other drugs and their effects are most closely correlated with which mechanism and by what author. associated with its study.

“We helped solve the problem of getting the right information into the hands of people,” says Wohns. And the initial version of the company’s summary technology was used in conjunction with OSTP’s existing search stack to make the results better. It not only returns things that should be more relevant, but also gives a reason for that relevance, showing (if you ask it) a representation of the graph and the nodes of a query and the items there are. Relevance is part of it.

Now they are working on similar projects for the federal government, which is dealing with a lot of reports and data but like any large organization it is difficult to categorize them all.

“In the two years since, we’ve redesigned the summarizer to handle longer documents (often hundreds of pages) and optimized the knowledge graph generator to scale to handle millions of documents in one graph,” writes co-founder and CTO Mohamed AlTantawy in an email to TechCrunch.

Like any self-respecting business micromodel, the systems Agolo deploys adapt themselves to the data set provided by the customer.

Two more examples of Agolo's metadata and search.

Image credits: Agolo

Because Agolo doesn’t create its own search solution, it partners with companies like Microsoft and Google, AlTantawy We are working with them on their enterprise services, implementing our solutions in their customer deployments. At Microsoft, we are integrated into 4 sales toolkits, the only non-Microsoft technology included here across Financial Services, Federal, Healthcare and Retail. ”

So a large government organization goes to the business search provider to sort out their documents, and the business search provider goes to Agolo to make sure the documents are indexed. item and understood in a real way.

“We are contracting directly with two US Government clients, with several others pending,” Wohns said. “In some of that software, we are being integrated with other software (from Microsoft and others) but license directly with Agolo. That fits our business model, where we have both direct and indirect channels.”

The Air Force and Department of Defense are among those customers, though Wohns could not be more specific. They are also working on a system to analyze and order Environmental, Social and Governance reports from large companies – another type of document that is easy enough to read one or three of them, but fast. It quickly goes awry when you look at 100 competing ESG reports from potential partners or investors.

The company’s recently concluded round A, led by Lytical Ventures, along with returning investors Microsoft M12, Google Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners, Ridgeline Partners and Thomson Reuters. The company has raised a total of over $18 million to date.

This money will be used for sales and marketing staff in particular, plus the product and engineering needed to continue working with its existing customers. It’s going to be announcing some big things this year, so hopefully our readers in the federal government will be able to find things a little easier after that.



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