If you look up Cambridge-based startup Diffeo – which bills itself as an artificial intelligence-powered research assistant – you’ll soon be tempted to try the product just to know more about the company.
After all, the group is a bit cagey about telling their own story. The first thing you’ll probably uncover when checking them out are obscure terms such as Memex, TREC and KBA on the company's "about" page.
If you poke around more, you'll find their origins include secretive research projects for DARPA – the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency -- something the company is hush-hush about.
But soon, you'll scroll down to an image of something pretty familiar: A messy desktop. You read more and find it belonged to the mother of the company’s co-founder, Jason Briggs.
Part of Diffeo's start, you'll discover, came from Briggs trying to help his mom find files among all the junk on her hard drive.
Now, that’s something we can all relate to.
Founded around 2012, Diffeo is essentially a combination of two startups, Diffeo and Meta Search, which merged last year to create the product it is today.
“You can think of it like a collaborative teammate who’s sitting next to you, reading over your shoulder, and bringing you information that you don’t yet have,” said Briggs, the startup’s chief operating officer, when describing Diffeo.
The subscription software connects all the programs running on a user's computer, such as word processor, file managers and browser; his company’s own databases and software; and outside sources such as LexisNexis, to help users find gaps in what he doesn’t know, and then recommend information that will fill those gaps, said Briggs. As the user picks results and continues work, the software reads what the user is reading and writing, and gets better and better at finding relevant information, he added.
The startup's 22 member team includes Briggs, formerly of Meta Search; CEO John Frank, who was trained at MIT and earlier served as "chief architect of search" at Nokia; and chief scientist Max Kleiman-Weiner, a Hertz fellow at MIT. They also have offices in Washington.
So far, Diffeo has concentrated on specific areas – namely defense and now finance – but soon expects to add more areas of expertise and eventually become a consumer product. It has collaborated with financial companies such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, American Express and Barclays to build its software, on top of its work for the military.
"We started out in defense, and last year did $3.8 million in sales," Briggs said at the FinTech Innovation Lab New York Demo Day earlier in June, according to a video recording of the presentation.
After raising close to $3 million before its merger with Meta Search, the company is seeking more capital over the next year to expand its clientele.
“There’s a wide range” of uses, said Briggs. “We started at the top of that range – so the origin was working with intelligence analysts who are trying to solve some of the craziest problems you can imagine." Over the last six months or Diffeo has focused on expanding beyond the defense sector to financial services.
It’s actually easier to build the company by focusing on concentrated areas rather than broad ones, noted Briggs, but the more it branches out, perhaps next to law and pharmaceuticals, the closer Diffeo comes to creating software useful for everyday work.
“Diffeo is building a personalized knowledge graph of what you care about on the fly to identify what are the gaps you have,” said Briggs, who says it’s nothing like Google or typical search engines that scour the web based on keywords plugged into a browser.
“What we asked was, How do you even begin to search for something if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” said Briggs. “What is relevant?”
