Introducing Weavit, an app that aims to be a “Shazam for your thoughts” – that is, it provides users with an alternative method of typing their thoughts into a note-taking tool, which is then matched to other content in a broader knowledge base. To date, Weavit allows you to link your notes to your contacts, meetings, topics, and other weblinks. You don’t have to organize your thoughts into those of a more structured nature first; you can just jot down your ideas and other inspiration. According to the founders of this startup, this is similar to how your brain works.
Komal Narwani, co-founder of Weavit, says that every thought we have is unstructured and simply cannot fit within our existing notes. In the most basic sense, you just want something out there, and you want the machine to do the organization for you – so that you can bring the information up at a later time, and it will be organized neatly.” In Weavit’s database, you can either type or dictate your idea. It works by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to connect certain items in the note to people, places, events, and other topics it knows about.
For example, if you wrote down that you met someone at a certain event like CES, then that event would be identified and linked to other content that referenced “CES”. Besides connecting with those Wikipedia topics, Weavit also gives you the ability to identify and connect a person to their company, location, past meetings, etc. As people write down their ideas, people can leverage their existing knowledge with these automated links. The company’s users can also make more manual connections with Weavit by using common tools such as hashtags and @mentions.
The idea for the note-taking app came to Weavit’s co-founder, Emmanuel Lefort, while he was working in a bank. In order to sell financial products to clients, the bank’s sales staff was not able to fully utilize the latent information hidden within individuals’ personal networks. If data could be automatically connected without having to manually enter it into a CRM, that would be interesting. As of launch, Weavit isn’t yet set up to connect its users’ content to others over some distributed network – like within an organization; that will be more of a long-term transition. Weavit records all your information in a secure, encrypted manner.
Since Weavit is still in the early stages of testing, it is available only to those with access codes. Narwani believes that Weavit could fill a void by being an approachable tool amid other graph-based applications like Roam Research or Obsidian, which he describes as Markdown-based knowledge management apps. It’s not just the fact that those productivity apps are more powerful and complex, it’s also the fact that they are harder to adopt – especially for everyday users who may not be as technical. While on the other hand Weavit allows anyone to quickly jot down notes not only about the work they’re doing, but also about everyday bits of information — like movie recommendations, names of your kid’s teachers, or web pages on a specific topic — so that they can be remembered, organized, and connected later.
With a team of six full-time employees based in Hong Kong, the startup raised $1.25 million from Fluxus Ventures in 2020. Based on user feedback, the app was retooled and relaunched in December 2021, even though the MVP had been live last year. Therefore, the version of the app available today is only a few weeks old. Weavit claims more than 1,500 people have signed up for the upgraded app in its first 10 days on the App Store. Besides the web app, the Weavit team is also developing a Chrome extension to help users capture images and web pages while browsing, so that Weavit can also collect content from the web – not just your own ideas or thoughts. Weavit is currently working and developing an Android app.
