I'm Dan, co-founder & CEO of Rewind.

I am eternally grateful to Hacker News for helping me launch my first startup, Optimizely (YC W10), so I’m back here to launch my second one: Rewind.

Rewind is the search engine for your life. Check it out: https://www.rewind.ai

It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.

We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In case you are curious, the inspiration for Rewind came from an unlikely place:

Our founding story

I started to go deaf in my 20s. When I turned 30, a hearing aid changed my life. To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower. Ever since that moment, I’ve been on a hunt for ways technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers.

That hunt ultimately led me to memory. Studies show that 90% of memories are forgotten after a week. Just like our hearing, our memory gets worse as we get older. But does it have to? If we have hearing aids for hearing and glasses for vision, what’s the equivalent for memory?

What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing? This question is why we founded Rewind. Our vision is to give humans perfect memory.

Introducing Rewind

Here’s how it works:

1. Local and Private By Design: We record anything you’ve seen, said, or heard and make it searchable. For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac. Only you have access to them. Learn more: <https://help.rewind.ai/en/collections/3616305-privacy>

2. Mind-Boggling Compression: Storing all the recordings locally means compression is very important. We compress raw recording data up to 3,750x times without major loss of quality. For example, 10.5GB of raw recording data becomes 2.8MB. That means that even with the smallest hard drive you can buy from Apple today, you can store years of recordings.

3. No Cloud Integration or IT Required: In order to enable you to search for anything you’ve seen, we use native macOS APIs and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to recognize & index all the words that appear on your screen. This means you don’t need to integrate with cloud products like Gmail, Dropbox, or Slack. Rewind starts capturing these apps right away, with no IT required. Also, OCR enables you to copy & paste anything from your past.

4. Meetings: In order to enable you to search for anything you’ve said or heard, we use state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR). This is particularly useful for meetings, where the content of discussions, debates, and decisions are often lost forever as soon as a meeting is over. With Rewind, you never have to worry about losing this content again. Rewind can capture the content of meetings, including everything that is said and everything that is shared visually. All of the content is searchable. You can go back to the exact moment in a meeting you are looking for by simply searching for a word that was said or a word that appeared on your screen. Learn more: <https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/6526620-recording-meeting>

5. Unleashes Apple Silicon: The key enabling technology that makes Rewind possible is Apple Silicon. We utilize virtually every part of the System on a Chip (SoC) so that running Rewind doesn’t tax system resources (like CPU and memory) while it is recording. It feels virtually imperceptible.

Rewind is just the first step toward our vision of giving humans perfect memory.

Please share any and all feedback you might have! We’re all ears