Finding a Needle in a Haystack: Introducing the Golden Research Engine

Our mission at Golden is to map all human knowledge - a long-term mission we announced in April which will result in Golden mapping 10 billion entities in high detail with an initial focus on technologies, companies, entrepreneurs, researchers, and more.

Our first paid product, the Golden Research Engine, is designed to help people in organizations stay current with, understand, and leverage the latest trends in their industry. It combines a powerful search across millions of entities in the Golden Knowledge Base, exotic types of entities you cannot normally query, fine-grained alerts to stay on top of changes, and semi-automatic research assistance for any gaps in our knowledge. It’s available via the web interface, API or integration to classic CRMs.

The following groups will find it highly useful:

  • Venture capitalists, investment banks, consultancies, and private equity investors - to research new sectors
  • Corporate development and strategy teams - to identify potential partners, acquisition targets, competitors, and to research industry trends
  • Sales teams - to enrich data and do additional research on leads
  • Partnerships teams - to understand the competitive landscape and make better decisions on who to partner with
  • Universities and R&D departments - to investigate new tools and technologies
  • Accelerators and incubators - to find the next technology, people or company in which to invest

Research Engine — powerful search made simple

The Research Engine works by searching across the entire Golden Knowledge Base and all of the structured data Golden has on millions of companies, people, venture capital firms, industries, and more. It’s available on a monthly SaaS subscription for $99/m/seat or via a more involved enterprise relationship for the API/Integrations. There are a number of principles we used in creating this tool.

Querying the unqueryable: Tools of the past have been very limited to a small number of types of things, such as companies, investors, and funding rounds. We chose to open this and help users query cryptocurrencies, technologies, laboratories, concepts, specific legal entities, and more. For example, here is a public query result for blockchain companies and projects. The image below shows a more specific example of a query for cryptocurrencies that both focuses on privacy applications and use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

Fine-grained queries: Historically it has been impossible to get high quality results for very specific terms. If you were looking for a company like Pembient, which works in a space that combines 3d printing with synthetic biology, no direct queries would have found them without also including lots of irrelevant results.

Unlike other companies, we cover fine-grained industries. That means in Golden each entity can be tagged with multiple fine-grained industries, making it easy to surface highly-specific and highly-relevant results.

Holistic information: In our user research, we found that people would have to search in multiple places to understand a topic once they had identified it with other tools. This included needing to look up basic information about the topic. We believe that by putting Golden topic pages (with encyclopedic-level information) next to query results, users can quickly understand the results at a much deeper level.

Comprehensive fields: Many tools either don’t have specific fields for aspects of an entity that you care about, or don’t let you easily search on those fields if they do exist. We’re excited about collecting fields that you can’t commonly search for but have real value for users. Non-exhaustive examples include: business model of a company, the discord channel or consensus mechanism of a cryptocurrency, the legal entity associated with a project, the YouTube channel of a person or company, or if a company is B2B, B2C, or a marketplace. There are hundreds of fields available across the different types of entities on Golden and we are keen to know what kind of fields you could not find information for.

Query across connections: By having a larger variety of topics in Golden we can do a better job at cross connecting queries. For example: who are the people working on CRISPR-Cas9 companies? What specific technologies are common to chatbot products? Where relationships exist between types (such as companies, people, products, etc), users can create complex queries across these associations.

Extended boolean search combinations: We have architected the Research Engine so there is high flexibility in combining different query ‘operators’ to find exactly what you want. These include combining “AND” and “OR” operators with tests if a value for a field exists (or doesn’t exist), and more.

Here we show a more complex example: a query to find companies working on blockchain or financial technology with locations in either San Francisco or New York City that have non-American nationality serial founders with post-money valuations greater than $250m.

AI assistance on a query: If you fail to find something in other query tools, there is nothing you can do, even if you believe you know the results should exist. On Golden, paid users can request more information to either fill out query results or on a specific entity.  

Alerts - be the first to know

While the first step of research is to create a query in the Research Engine, the second step is to stay on top of changes to these queries to find signals that will drive decisions. Even if you already know all the relevant companies in your industry today, new ones will get founded next month and you should know about them first.

There are two ways you can set up alerts in Golden. First, you can save queries that you care about, and in the same flow, tick one box to get daily email alerts if there are any new results.

Once alerts are enabled, we’ll monitor your query and send you a daily summary of new results as changes occur.

We’ve designed queries to be shared across an organization, making it easy to collaborate on queries and areas of interest across a team. The main innovation here is what we call fine-grained alerts. Instead of just being alerted to new results to a query, you can subscribe to alerts if particular fields change across existing results. For example, you can query:

  • Which companies in a query have had a CEO change?
  • Which companies entered a particular vertical you are interested in?
  • Which companies have raised a new round of funding?
  • Which people have founded an additional company?

These alerts can help make sure you’re alerted to information you want to know about, as soon as Golden has it. We believe this will make you more knowledgeable and make better decisions.

Automated research assistance

While Golden continues to collect information, there will be some inevitable gaps in our information. In order to help patch these gaps we are offering clients tools to allow quick retrieval of information to which we are coming up initially empty. This is designed long-term to be an AI-assisted tool.

Paid users see “Request more information” buttons on both Golden entity pages as well as in the Golden Research Engine so we never leave a query unanswered.

Clicking on those buttons kicks off a process at Golden where our contracted researchers and AI tools go looking for specific information to fulfill that request. It could be filling out information on a topic where we have patchy coverage or identifying companies of a particular type; for example, cell-based meat companies based in San Francisco or New York.

This is an experiment, but one we’re excited about. It’s an example of where meeting the needs of paid clients results in a better knowledge base that’s then open and available to the public.

APIs available for enrichment, discovery, and integrations

Everything in the Golden Research Engine is available via our API on our Enterprise plan or via integrations. If you are interested in having access to this kind of information over API or an integration please get in touch with us.

Accelerating open data

We are also opening open public queries we believe are useful for the world - for example, here is a list of regenerative medicine companies or Financial technology companies founded by serial entrepreneurs. If you see anything incorrect on our open queries, please feel free to fix them or get your entity into Golden.

Get started today

If you are interested, check the pricing and get access to Golden for business. Schedule your demo by contacting us and we can show you feature by feature how Golden will work for you.

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