Ten minutes with: SimSage
1. How long has your company been in operation, and what was the inspiration for its founding?
SimSage was founded to help companies to get far more value from their Information Assets. Companies invest in many systems (Office 365; Content Management Systems; CRMs etc) and the amount of information within companies of all types and sizes, grows every single day. This is making it increasingly time-consuming to find the exact information when you need it, decreasing productivity and increasing cost, but also increasing the risk of using outdated or incorrect information.
Co-founders, Sean Wilson and Rock de Vocht, who founded and exited a previous search company in New Zealand a few years ago, share a passion for helping companies to get the most out of their data and systems investment; after all, what’s the point of collecting and storing information if you can’t find and use it?
2. What is special about your company’s products / services?
Everyone immediately asks how we’re different to Google. Google is a fantastic product that helps you find information on the internet. SimSage, however, is the product for finding information inside your company; we leave the internet to Google! SimSage searches all of your different systems from the one search box (true Enterprise Search), but for the more technically-minded, it is also a ‘semantic’ and ‘full-text’ search, powered by our own brand of AI, meaning that we simply find information faster, more accurately and without all the ‘false positive’ results we often encounter, and allowing queries to be posed in ‘natural language’ and removing the need for Boolean search.
SimSage is technology-agnostic in that it is able to operate from any public/private Cloud (or from an internally-hosted server), and is also able to be integrated with most third-party platforms and systems, enhancing the investment into, and value of, those systems by making the information they contain far more accessible and usable.
3. Where does your company see its industry heading in the next ten years?
The ‘search’ industry continues to evolve. With the amount of information continually being added to company systems and the continuing move towards automation and ‘zero-touch’, there is increasing reliance on better search/find technology. ’AI’ for SimSage, is about automating basic and repetitive tasks and processes, speeding up the pace of business, and progressively increasing levels of analytics for our customers to get more value from their company information to enable them to stay competitive in the market. Voice recognition technologies are also getting better, and we see integrating with one of more of these as inevitable once they achieve a higher rate of consistency and accuracy.
4. What is your company currently working on?
Our core product is an extremely powerful and effective AI-based Search engine, but the requirements to make it of more use to the market, our customers, and our business partners is to continually: improve the UX; improve scalability and performance, and; the end-to-end security
5. What is your company looking for from the CW community? What engagement opportunities can it offer?
Sean and Rock (and SimSage) are new to Cambridge. We’ve come to Cambridge as it has a fantastic reputation as a highly-collaborative science, research, and tech hub, with many success stories, and it has a good fast business pace and rhythm. We are looking to collaborate with others who can help us to not only better engage with our key markets (Legal; Health; Pharma; Technology), but also with tech companies that can see advantages in integrating a very powerful search product with their own platforms, to provide a much more effective experience for their products’ users and customers. We are already attracting interest from software platform providers in the Legal and Pharma Sectors.