Outmind, one of the first fully plug & play internal search engines, has announced today that it has raised €500K from Mustard Seed MAZE, Sharpstone Capital, BPIFrance, and business angels as it launches its first production version. These funds will contribute to continue the development of Outmind’s technology, to support its commercial development in Europe, and to strengthen its team by doubling the number of employees. Outmind just joined the Future 40, the 40 most promising companies among 1200 of Station F.
Founded in 2019 by Grace Mehrabe and Arthur Caillaud, Outmind is disrupting the field of knowledge management softwares. Today, there are on average 88 different SAAS tools used in companies (Okta 2020), and 20% of working time is lost looking for information (McKinsey). In response to this, the Outmind team has created a smart search engine, connected to the company’s internal tools (CRM, ERP, collaborative tools such as Office 365 or Google Drive, emails, and project management tools), to save up to 4 hours per week, per employee. The solution is based on the latest indexing and machine learning techniques, to offer the most relevant results to the user in a fraction of a second. It also indicates which person to ask for when enough data isn’t shared to the user.
Grace Mehrabe, co-founder and CEO, said: “Business habits have changed with data proliferation. Today, each employee uses on average more than 10 different tools daily. Native search modules are proving to be inefficient and incomplete. We’re aiming to make internal information much more accessible, to enable better and quicker decision-making. With the pandemic, the problem became stronger: remote workers can’t ask their next desk colleague anymore, but they still need to access knowledge. We’re more than ever commited to create the best experience for them. In the longer term, our goal is to go beyond search, to bring the information to the user in a contextual way, when he needs it. This means continuing our R&D to be at the forefront of semantic analysis and machine learning techniques”.
Outmind targets an international market, estimated at more than €10 billion, and plans to expand in the English-speaking world in the coming months, which it already started with first customers in France and Europe. The company is now preparing to deploy the solution to more than 30 partner companies of various sizes, from SMEs to large groups.
Henry Wigan, Managing Partner of MSM, explained: “Search has changed the world in the last 30 years, with the advent of the likes of Google. Information previously available to the privileged few is now available to every person on the planet with access to an internet connection. It is our conviction that the next frontier of search is within organisations, where at present information is poorly distributed and shared. Making this information transparent and discoverable offers a significant productivity opportunity, in particular in education and healthcare. Arthur and Grace are a bright, technical and driven young team, and MSM is excited to be partnering at this early stage in their mission.”
