Investing in Objective

If you've ever been unsure of what to type into a search box on a website or app, you've encountered the limits of keyword search. 

Today’s existing search infrastructure runs on keyword indexes. This technique limits your expression to existing words or phrases in a dataset. You have to play a frustrating guessing game to find the right words to describe what you’re looking for.

Recent advances in AI-native semantic search have brought us closer to a world where we can type natural language queries and get highly accurate results. Objective is at the forefront of this shift and has built the easiest way for developers to add modern semantic search to their products. 

I couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with the team through my work at Matrix!

‍When we first met the Objective team, they had been working on making computers understand content for decades. Pablo, Objective’s CEO, is among the most cited NLP researchers. His early work in content understanding pre-saged many of the advances we take for granted today. Pablo and cofounder Jo had taken a stab at an earlier version of the problem as researchers at Lattice Data – a startup Apple eventually acquired. At Apple, they would meet Lance, and continue to tackle the problem of content understanding as engineering leaders on the Siri Knowledge team. This founding trio’s collective experience in the search domain is only matched by their deep product insight and expansive vision.‍

Objective’s Search API is multimodal. It lets developers implement search over text, images, video, and audio. Objective does all the heavy lifting — combining the latest research and the best developer experience. The team obsesses over every detail of the developer experience. Integrating your data is straightforward regardless of where it lives: Postgres, S3, or a CSV file. The API primitives and developer experience are clean and delightful. 

Already, enterprises of all kinds are driving business value with the product. 

‍Objective powers e-commerce search for customers like Pod Foods, with broad product catalogs that change frequently. Objective keeps up with the size and rate of change and makes it simple to continuously improve search quality.

‍Content-rich customers like The Information use Objective’s API to manage thousands of long-form editorial articles. Objective’s high-quality results make it easy for users to find relevant articles, with the goal of boosting engagement.

For customers like Dribbble, who have millions of images and hordes of text data, Objective’s multimodal search shines right out of the box and allows for a delightful user experience. 

At Matrix, we love working with technical founders on day one who don’t shy away from complex and consequential problems. We are excited to be working with the Objective team!