Sorcero

D.C. Startup Sorcero is Creating a Search Engine for Your Business Data By Kieran McQuilkin -November 23, 2018 Share Facebook Twitter Linkedin For every enterprise, there’s a slightly different way of organizing information, whether it’s folders in a server, shared documents, email threads or web-based programs. But chances are, there’s no place to type in a question and receive quality answers pulled directly from your organization’s troves of information and content. That’s where Sorcero comes in. The D.C.-based company was founded in October last year and is approaching the close of a $1.2 million seed round, for which CEO Dipanwita Das said more than $800,000 is committed and the rest is in negotiation stages. The basic concept for Sorcero is straightforward: Documents from an organization are ingested and broken up into pieces of text, and the AI comes up with content that might answer questions from employees. It’s much larger than any FAQ could be, Chief Learning Architect Walter Bender said, but smarter to search because it uses language and meaning analytics to connect what people are looking for. “So the question, ‘Who’s the main contact for a particular contract?’ is the same as, ‘Who’s in charge of a particular contract?’” Bender said. “A lot of what we do is being able to connect things that way without huge amounts of training data.” Sorcero has five full-time employees and a contracted engineering team, and plans to expand to 13 or 14 people in the next year, Das said. The Sorcero team says the software is generally industry-agnostic, and one of its main goals is to find the industries where it can be most impactful. At the outset, medical institutions have been a solid fit. “Our highest and best use case for the product is with medical and scientific information, overlaid with dictionaries and ontologies belonging to companies themselves and content ingested into it,” Bender said. “Lots of AI can do simple tasks, but ours excels in an area where it needs to be precise.” For example, he said: In the medical device industry, a sales rep has to be capable of selling deep brain scanning tech and has to be present in the operating room with surgeons. If they are unable to answer questions asked by doctors, they don’t add value, and having Sorcero allows them to quickly access their company’s data and expertise. Sorcero has active pilots with three of the top-10 pharmaceutical companies, plus 11 other customers in industries including cleantech, legal advocacy and adult learning. The software is applicable in plenty other areas, which presents the startup with the challenge of picking its spots wisely. “It’s a blessing and curse that there are so many use cases,” Das said. “For a team that intends to stay lean to an extent, it could pull us in all sorts of directions. We’d rather have one product that does incredibly well.” Photo courtesy Sorcero.