AI Search Startup Forethought Wins Startup Battlefield Competition at San Francisco Disrupt 2018

Forethought, a startup centered around artificial intelligence-based search, won the prestigious Startup Battlefield competition at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.

For coming in first, the early-stage company win $100,000 and the Disrupt Cup. Forethought beat out 20 other startups over the three-day battlefield challenge, including the other four finalists, CB Therapeutics, Mira, Origami Labs, and Unbound.

“Forethought has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work,” wrote TechCrunch. “Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.”

The company doesn’t rely on keywords like most traditional search providers. Instead, it uses what TechCrunch characterizes as an “information retrieval model driven by artificial intelligence underpinnings that they then embed directly into the workflow.”

This search engine was designed to “index millions of documents at scale very quickly” then apply natural language processing and natural language understanding to “read the documents as a human would,” stated the publication.

Forethought now joins a long list of other prominent startups that have participated in the competition, including Mint, Yammer, GetAround, and YourMechanic.

Among the judges at this year’s Startup Battlefield were Cyan Banister of Founders Fund, Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Jeff Clavier or Uncork Capital, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, and Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch.

(Image credit: Mohamed Hassan / Pixabay)

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