More and more, a workday generates an infinity of information. Emails, attachments, presentations, video calls, chats, external servers... Then, the problem comes when you have to find where the document you have to end up using is. The startup Nuclia wants to put an end to this waste of time and chaos with a search engine that allows finding any file in a short time, detecting the main concepts. To commercialize its technology, it has just closed a pre-seed round of five million euros, led by the European funds specialized in deeptech and SaaS B2B Crane.vc and Elaia.
The search engine of this emerging company based in Manresa will allow finding the exact information needed, regardless of the language and format in which it is found ---PDF, documents, videos or PowerPoints---. The technology developed by Eudald Camprubí and Ramon Navarro will index all the data contained in the multiple files that a company generates in its day-to-day and will dump them into the search engine. In this way, workers will be able to search for what they need and find it quickly.
Nuclia has gone a step further in the conception of its system and has included semantic search. "Word search no longer makes sense. Information search has to be by meaning, reflecting the way people speak," says Camprubí, co-founder and CEO of the company. In this way, if an employee had to search in their file for who is the best client the company has, this startup's search engine would provide documentation that would answer this question, but not literally. That is, it would locate information about which supplier pays fastest, which makes the largest orders, or which makes them with more recurrence.
Nuclia allows finding files in different languages and multiple formats, in addition to including semantic searchIn addition, the artificial intelligence algorithms it incorporates will be able to detect key information such as the people who appear, figures, percentages, dates or legal clauses. All these concepts will be broken down and identified in the original source so they can be consulted in a few seconds. It will also do so if this data was in a video ---such as those from Teams, Zoom, or Google Meets meetings---, analyzing them to be able to mark at what moment the information being sought was discussed.
In other words, Nuclia will allow a large-scale Control + F to be performed on all the files a company works with. The startup focuses on offering its service to companies, which will not need extensive computer knowledge or specialized professionals to incorporate the search engine into their routine. "It has to be accessible to everyone," emphasizes Navarro, the other co-founder of the company and CTO.
After passing through the United States
Nuclia is not Camprubí and Navarro's first business project. 11 years ago, they created a software consultancy, Iskra.cat, specialized in developing intranets for companies and which has worked for ABB, Mediapro, Stradivarius, and Tous. The experience accumulated at Iskra.cat helped them become aware of all the shortcomings of these networks, as well as the ground that could be covered thanks to the use of artificial intelligence.
They also had some of the main technology companies in San Francisco as clients. This allowed them to go to the United States for a couple of years to develop projects related to eDiscovery. It was then that the two entrepreneurs realized that they could do the same from home. "We like to say that we are from Manresa. Technology can be developed from anywhere," Navarro defends.
"We like to say that we are from Manresa. Technology can be developed from anywhere," Navarro defendsWith the creation of Nuclia, Iskra.cat continues its path, with a team of 21 engineers. The round they have just closed must serve to grow the new company, which will go from the current ten employees to 27 by 2023, all of them remote.The resources obtained will have to help locate highly specialized profiles that are very difficult to find, even more so in Barcelona. The two co-founders criticize that the policy of attracting large multinationals to the Catalan capital makes it difficult for small local companies like theirs, which cannot compete to retain talent either in terms of conditions or projection.
Until now, Nuclia has worked for companies such as Suez or PC Componentes. With these two clients, the search engine has served to process customer complaints, with functionalities such as detecting when vulnerable customers send them ---in the case of Suez--- or finding incidents that have occurred in other countries and seeing how they were resolved ---PC Componentes---. They have also collaborated with companies in the pharmaceutical sector and are starting to do so with educational centers such as the University of Vic (UVic) and hospitals.
Forecast of results
With the publication of the round, the startup, which has partnered with Tech Barcelona, will offer to test its technology to about 70 developers, the intermediary with whom they will work to bring their product to companies. Camprubí indicates that in Europe they do not have many competitors, but they do have them in China and the United States.
The price of their search engine will be per character, that is, it will depend on all the text it has to process from the different information sources, with a very low unit value. They estimate that a company will be able to contract their services starting from 300 euros per month. They expect to start monetizing in two or three years, but before that they will have to have created a sufficient community of clients. Camprubí points out that he does not believe they will reach one million euros in turnover in 2023, but expects revenues to grow strongly from 2024.