Morphik: Open-source multimodal search for AI agents reaches $150M-valued Glean-adjacent market

your company. How you doing? Morphix in the studio. I see one hat. I got to give out a second hat. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Good catch. Come on down. Good catch. Uh, who are you? What do you do? Uh, we are Morphic AI and we build open-source multimodal search for AI agents and applications. Okay.

Open- source multimodal search. What are uh give me some examples of the multimodality. Uh, what are we searching? because some of these data sets I'm imagining if you're trying to search over YouTube videos, YouTube's going to shut you down if I'm trying to search across that. No, that's a great question.

So, for multimodality, it includes not only like just plain textual documents, but documents that might have pictures, photos, images embedded inside of them. What a lot of other people approach it as is uh trying to do OCR parsing on top, but that doesn't work cuz documents are Yeah, PDFs are a nightmare.

PDF is a disaster. We know this. It's a disaster. We've known this for decades. It's not getting any better. Adobe, clean it up. What what we do is we edit pages directly as images and retrieve over those. That is much higher accuracy, much much better performance. Yep. Very cool.

Are you guys going to be able to fix the photos app searching photos? Very. We have to if Apple gives us a chance. Yeah. Yeah. Give them a shot. Give it a shot.

It does seem like they're trying to do that type of multimodal search on cross of it, but they're just not there yet in terms of like I'll be searching for, you know, a dog jumping on a couch. I know that I have it in my camera roll, but it's a video and that scene happened later and they haven't indexed it properly.

So, lots of opportunities. Talk about where people are implementing this. Is it enterprise private data sets? Is it public scrape the web? I want to search everything. Narrow it down for me. Mhm. It's a little bit of both. Uh the most adoption is in the legal tech space.

Also in the health tech space, they have like lots of documents with like tables, charts. Patent drafting for example has like a lot of technical diagrams in there course and and it works really well for those people as well. Okay. Uh talk to me about the other major players in the space.

We saw Glean yesterday raised what 150 million at 7. 2 billion. Uh this feels somewhat adjacent. You're kind of eating off their plate a little bit. Is that a direct competitor or is there something different where you can play nicely with them? Yeah.

So I mean uh the kind of benefit for us is that we provide APIs and we're much more of a developer tool and the way we see this going is actually not as a competitor to glean but like more of like a provider to glean right and not just glean but to uh people that are building like cursor for x and you need to deal with multimodal documents that's exactly what we can help you with.

So, we're starting with search, but that's not it, right? One of the things that cursor uh the reason why like tools like cursor and like coding agents have become really good is because code is low entropy, which means you can predict like well into the future what code is going to look like.

Um, one thing that we can do is help you get that low entropy with multimodal information. And so, like what video editing looks like kind of like three or four steps in the future, if I've like cut a clip and like cut another clip, I kind of know that I'm going to delete the thing in the middle, right?

And so if you can use that and essentially provide that to models as like code uh that ends up like performing a lot better and uh you can start building cursor for video editing and you can start building curs. How did you guys meet? What were you doing before YC? We're both brothers.

Uh before yeah before YC I was a software engineer at MongoDB. Oh cool. And this guy dropped out the open source thing tracks dropped out aware. Right. Yes. Exactly. Cornell. Nice. Very cool. Uh yeah, talk to talk to us about the open source strategy. How closely are you mimicking MongoDB?

We heard earlier on the show that MongoDB didn't have a managed service, a SAS product until they almost went IPO. Um are you planning to monetize the open-source uh program earlier? What is the play between am I using the open source version or am I paying you look like? Yeah, good question.

The way we see it is for people who if it benefits a single community member then we want to open source it. If it benefits a team then we want to leave it close source. Interesting. So things like SSO, things like connectors like Google Drive etc. or maybe like speeding it up for like making queries much faster.

This is all going to fall apart when people start building oneperson billion dollar companies because you're going to be like it all has to be open source because you only have one person. That's true. That'll be a good problem. That's a good problem to have. Yeah.

Um but but but uh digging in more into the open source, what's the traction been like? Do you have a GitHub project that has a lot of stars? What what do you what are you tracking in terms of roll out? 2600 stars today. Congratulations. That's fantastic. 4,000 monthly downloads. Amazing. Thank you.

And uh 200 active deployments in production. Fantastic. There we go. Here we go. Audience is uh probably mad at me in the chat for that one, but uh it's amazing. Amazing. Yeah, it's fantastic. You guys came into YC with this specific idea or did you iterate to it uh throughout? We came in with a much uh broader idea.

We weren't too focused or indexed on multimodal before. We were like hey just we want to be the data layer. What sort of helped us was trying to narrow down on the multimodal aspect seeing how people are building more and just yeah building on from there. Did you always want to start a company together? Yes.

That's been a dream since we were kids but yeah. Incredible. Incredible. Uh how's uh how's fundraising going? Fundraising is going well. We're kind of close, but uh yeah, looking looking to do it faster. Another one. Well, congratulations. It's been great chatting with you. Good luck on the next stage of your journey.

We'll be we'll be following along along. We're excited to use cursor for video whenever whenever that send them our way. Yeah, they'll probably build it on top of your company. So, thank you so much for stopping by. Sounds so much. Thanks for coming on. Bye.