Vectara Launches Conversational Search Platform for Enterprise

Introduction

Vectara, a conversational search platform for the enterprise, was created by Amr Awadallah, Amin Ahmad, and Tallat Shafaat, three former Google employees. They developed Vectara to help organizations extract and summarize data from vast corporate data stores through conversational AI apps. The platform launched in May 2021 and is powered by API-based search technology that can handle queries of any length, ambiguity, and language across multiple documents. Vectara has received $28.5 million in seed funding led by Race Capital with participation from Emad Mostaque, the founder of Stability AI.

Revolutionizing Search Tech

Vectara is a search engine that allows users to ask questions about their company’s data and receive a summary with citations to the source data set. The platform ingests new documents in real time, providing “client-configurable” data retention. This means that organizations can discard the original documents and text after indexing to ensure no residual data from the company remains in Vectara’s search index. The platform is also designed to mitigate inaccuracy and bias, constraining AI models to retrieve the most relevant content from the data sets organizations have chosen to index.

Applications of Vectara’s Tech

According to Amr Awadallah, organizations like Conversica, Apex Chat, Metus, and Oncotelic Therapeutics have been applying Vectara’s tech to use cases such as legal discovery, ecommerce search, news monitoring, and financial analysis. Vectara enables teams to capture money that’s being left on the table, better use time that’s being wasted, and unlock further insights that become available when search intent is understood. The ability to express our needs verbally marks a significant evolution in how user interfaces will be designed in the future, similar to the transition from touch buttons to touch screens.

The Expansion Plan

Vectara, headquartered in Cupertino, California, has 24 employees and plans to use its seed funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific regions. The cognitive search market is expected to be worth $15.28 billion by 2023, up from $2.59 billion in 2018, according to Markets and Markets. Expansion is crucial if Vectara hopes to stay ahead of its enterprise search rivals, including Forethought and Coveo.

Conclusion

The future of search technology lies in conversational AI. With its cognitive search platform, Vectara is uniquely positioned to offer organizations a solution that can extract valuable information from vast data stores. As the demand for cognitive search tech grows, Vectara must continue to innovate and expand if it wishes to carve out a bigger slice of the enterprise search market.