Proem 2024 - A Year in Review
2024 was a wild ride for us - our first full year with funding and a growing team of talented people joining us in our mission. We’re proud of our small crew for shipping product updates on a monthly cadence, at times even faster.
Here’s our year-one story, complete with reflections, failures, and celebrations. Let’s dive in.
From Day 1, our focus has been to leverage the best foundational LLMs and our deep knowledge of scientific research to build useful products for critical thinkers and knowledge-intensive teams focused on extracting key insights from research papers. Throughout all of last year, we have been exploring a variety of product categories and launching rapid product prototypes for early adopters. Here's everything we shipped:
JANUARY
Proem Custom GPT
Three days after OpenAI launched custom GPTs, we created the Proem GPT with RAG, which analyzed user questions, searched the world’s largest repository of research papers, and composed answers based on relevant science.
APRIL
Proem Ask
We built a standalone answer engine that referenced answers to relevant research from a database of over 300 million papers, available to everyone for free. Proem Ask offers better grounding, exclusively citing research, and allows users to dive directly into the papers. Our users are fascinated by the breadth and depth of insights in current research, just as we are.
JUNE
Proem for R&D teams
We built a feature set based on feedback from several friends in the local deep-tech community asking for ways to use our Answer Engine for internal R&D work.
AUGUST
Proem Embedded Feeds
In partnership with FemTech Insider, we launched an embedded feed of the latest Femtech related research papers, that is currently shown on the leading FemTech blog, Femtech Insider, and viewed by thousands of readers every month.
SEPTEMBER
Proem Vector Search Index
We built our own semantic index of latest research papers, which turned out to be quite superior to the Search API from our content partner, both in speed and accuracy. That index is now powering both our Embedded Feeds and the Proem Ask.
OCTOBER
Proem News
News articles are often reduced to bland accounts of events, political hyperbole, or clickbait. Proem News takes any news article and provides a clear summary explaining the facts behind the events described, referencing relevant research papers.
NOVEMBER
Browser Extension & iPhone App
In November, we also shipped a Proem News app in TestFlight and a browser extension so you can enrich any article with knowledge from scientific research easily.
NOVEMBER
Proem Chat
We decided to port Proem Ask to a leading Chat UI framework, making it both phone and desktop-compatible. This provides several features that users have come to expect from a chat application, with the polish of a large project.
DECEMBER
Report Automation
We started a collaboration with a large global enterprise to help them automate workflows and reports with grounding in specific trusted sources.
Looking Ahead
Our strategy has always been to ship thin slices of product ideas to quickly learn and adapt. We’ve explored quite a few user groups and use cases. Most experiments are still running in some form, so we can keep showing it off and learning from user feedback.
After having spent a year building for and experimenting with different user groups, we’ve honed in on one. The Deep-Tech teams that do the immense work of transforming scientific research from the lab to creating real world impact.
Our goal is to accelerate their productivity, and be a catalyst for scientific insights reaching their full potential of having a positive impact on the world.
Stay tuned.
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Check out: The Road Ahead
