Heyday lands $6 million to build knowledge base from services you already use – TechCrunch

Have you ever spent far too long trying – and failing – to rediscover articles you’ve partially read? This reporter has been there, and it looks like I’m not the only one. According to a 2021 Carnegie Mellon study Regarding the use of browser tabs, many participants admitted to feeling overwhelmed by the number of tabs they kept open, but were forced not to close them for fear of missing valuable information.

Samiur Rahman is familiar with sentiment – so much so that he co-created a product, Apogee, to attenuate it. Launched in 2021, Heyday is designed to automatically save web pages and pull content from cloud applications, resurfacing content alongside search engine results and curating it in a knowledge base.

Investors include Spark Capital, which led a $6.5 million seed round in the company that closed today. Abstract Ventures, Packy McCormick’s Not Boring syndicate, Ride Ventures, Spacecadet Ventures and several angel investors participated.

“I co-founded Heyday in 2021 with Sam DeBrule. Sam and I had recently shut down a product in the knowledge management space that failed to gain traction,” Rahman told TechCrunch via email. mail. Rahman was previously a software engineer at Amazon, while DeBrule co-founded two startups, Ventfull and Tempo, before joining Heyday. “During the process of creating the product, we encountered a group of early adopters who felt bad served by popular knowledge management tools that require constant manual input. We’ve always been passionate about helping people deal with information overload, so we decided to use our expertise in machine learning to create a product that leans heavily on automation to free people from repetitive tasks and use their information more effectively.

Heyday, whose client comes in the form of a browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi) and applications for desktop or iOS, can extract files, links, histories from browser and conversations from platforms such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Slack and Twitter. During setup, users indicate topics of interest to them, connect their accounts, and optionally sign up for a daily “Flashback” email that resurfaces on recently searched topics. Searches can be performed in the user’s public engine of choice (e.g. Google, Bing) or from Heyday’s search interface, which recognizes prompts for things like calendar events, types of files and even recipes and Twitter profiles.

The system is powered by an artificial intelligence model trained on more than 15 GB of English text retrieved from the web, which performs “similarity scoring” for each search to match content based on its semantic similarity. For each piece of content (e.g. a web page or document) a user views, another model – refined on Heyday’s own collection of articles and tags – predicts related topics that might be suggested to that user. Additional templates categorize content by topics a user has already followed and generate summaries of the content.

“With this, we can suggest new topics for users to follow and suggest content for them to embed into existing tracked topics, so they can automatically populate their own knowledge base,” Rahman said. “The challenge for founders building in the knowledge management and productivity space is that the early adopters who are most excited to try new tools are likely not representative of the broader population of people who are still defaulting to Google Docs and Apple Notes, and we’re seeing new products popping up that get a ton of initial attention from people who are passionate about productivity, but then fail to gain mass adoption. a product that optimizes ease of use over depth and flexibility, founders like us have the opportunity to conquer the market.”

Picture credits: Apogee

I only tested Heyday for a short while, but I can confidently say that it was helpful in diving back into forgotten rabbit holes. Within minutes of installing the Chrome extension, Heyday highlighted the items I had been looking for last week when searching for a “buy now, pay later” apps feature.

Heyday crunches a lot of personal information. But Rahman says the platform encrypts all data so that no one but users sees their respective timelines. All data associated with users who choose not to pay for Heyday after the trial period is deleted, as is data belonging to customers who refuse to renew their subscriptions. (Heyday is free for the first 14 days and $10 per month thereafter.)

Rahman says that “people who read and research a lot online” – content marketers, entrepreneurs, investors, etc. – are among the first users of Heyday. It’s just the beginning, but eventually Heyday plans to create an experience for teams that will aggregate content from individual users into a shared knowledge base.

“Heyday competes with tools and other DIY systems people use to remember things — like leaving hundreds of browser tabs open, sending content to each other, and leaving newsletters unread,” said Rahman. “[We’re] well positioned to face potential headwinds.

While declining to reveal earnings numbers or the size of Heyday’s customer base, Rahman said closing the last round gives Heyday a lead that will last more than two and a half years. Heyday has four employees based in its San Francisco, California office; it plans to hire four more by 2023.