Lumona

At Lumona, we're transforming the way people search online.

Searching should be effortless for any question, no matter if the answer is buried in the depths of the internet, whether it be in a niche subreddit or from a sea of TikTok videos. However, options for finding this information are subpar at best. The search features of social media platforms often fail to guide users effectively, leading them to creatively use traditional search engines by adding terms like 'reddit' to their queries in an effort to uncover more relevant results. This “hacky” solution only searches Reddit when a more accurate answer or crucial context may lie somewhere else that requires additional searches to find. Moreover, the prevalence of misinformation adds another layer of complexity, as unverified data and prioritized SEO-driven results can mislead users.

LLMs have enabled the automatic ingestion and understanding of huge amounts of information. Instead of summarizing links from existing search techniques, our approach is to use LLMs to mirror the structure of information on the internet itself, creating an internet of LLMs that are experts on the content you are looking for. This approach allows fact-checking, additional context, and up-to-date information about the topic to be added to search results.

We're a group of 3 MIT students with internships at companies like Google, Stripe, Matroid, and Reddit who started work on Lumona in September 2023 after winning HackMIT. We have experience planning, building, and shipping new features and projects from start to finish in diverse company environments. Growing up in the age of social media, we are poised to tackle the ever-widening gap between current search solutions and our needs.