Today we are launching Rewind: the search engine for your life.
It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.
We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The inspiration for Rewind came from an unlikely place 👇
Our founding story
I started to go deaf in my 20s. When I turned 30, a hearing aid changed my life. To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower. Ever since that moment, I’ve been on a hunt for ways technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers.
That hunt ultimately led me to memory. Studies show that 90% of memories are forgotten after a week. Just like our hearing, our memory gets worse as we get older. But does it have to? If we have hearing aids for hearing and glasses for vision, what’s the equivalent for memory?
What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing? This question is why we founded Rewind. Our vision is to give humans perfect memory.
The pivot
We began pursuing our vision in March 2020, and the first product we built was Scribe, a bot that records all your meetings and makes them searchable and shareable. We’re lucky to have had 30,000 users use Scribe. These users provided us with invaluable feedback, and we developed several insights that inspired us to pivot to an even bigger idea that we are launching today.
Introducing Rewind
Today we are unveiling Rewind: the search engine for your life. It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.
Here’s how it works:
- 🔒 Local and Private By Design: We record anything you’ve seen, said, or heard and make it searchable. For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac. Only you have access to them. Learn more.
- 🤯 Mind-Boggling Compression: Storing all the recordings locally means compression is very important. We compress raw recording data up to 3,750x times without major loss of quality. For example, 10.5GB of raw recording data becomes 2.8MB. That means that even with the smallest hard drive you can buy from Apple today, you can store years of recordings.
- 💻 No Cloud Integration or IT Required: In order to enable you to search for anything you’ve seen, we use native macOS APIs and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to recognize & index all the words that appear on your screen. This means you don’t need to integrate with cloud products like Gmail, Dropbox, or Slack. Rewind starts capturing these apps right away, with no IT required. Also, OCR enables you to copy & paste anything from your past.
- 🗣️ Meetings: In order to enable you to search for anything you’ve said or heard, we use state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR). This is particularly useful for meetings, where the content of discussions, debates, and decisions are often lost forever as soon as a meeting is over. With Rewind, you never have to worry about losing this content again. Rewind can capture the content of meetings, including everything that is said and everything that is shared visually. All of the content is searchable. You can go back to the exact moment in a meeting you are looking for by simply searching for a word that was said or a word that appeared on your screen. Learn more.
- Unleashes Apple Silicon: The key enabling technology that makes Rewind possible is Apple Silicon. We utilize virtually every part of the System on a Chip (SoC) so that running Rewind doesn’t tax system resources (like CPU and memory) while it is recording. It feels virtually imperceptible.
I’m incredibly proud of the product we’ve built, and I’m grateful to our team for bringing the product to life. Every member of our team is truly exceptional, and I am lucky to have the privilege of working with them. I want to especially thank my co-founder, Brett Bejcek, who has been instrumental in making today a reality.
Announcing our round
The product we are unveiling today is just the first step toward our vision of giving humans perfect memory. To help us achieve our ambitious vision, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from First Round Capital and other fantastic investors. Andreessen Horowitz was the largest investor in my last company, Optimizely, so I am honored that they’ve decided to invest in me again. Here's why they invested. This funding will enable us to continue to invest in building a world-class team, especially software engineers with Swift and/or AI expertise.
Help make our vision a reality
Our vision to give humans perfect memory is ambitious and will take many, many years to bring to life. Please apply to join us if you are excited about making our vision a reality!