Intro TL/DR:

Hello HN, I’m Adrian Kibet CEO & co-founder of Fahamu Inc, a Delaware C-Corp. Our goal is to provide equal access to data and knowledge. Fahamu means understand in Swahili. Our first product offering is Digest, a data assistant that provides a singular access point for all your data (currently only documents but we’re in the process of adding databases as a data source). Our individual pricing packages go for 3 or 15 $.

Our Product & Features:

Digest allows you to create a pdf or txt document archive (and soon we’re adding the ability to attach a database) then extract specific information from it by simply asking the question you want answered. It then shows you the answer and where the answer was extracted from within your documents to avoid hallucination.

Multiple document upload & search - Digest allows for the upload of multiple documents with a limit on the number of documents depending on the user's package. There is a size limit of 35 mb on the documents but no length limit.

Context - Digest has a context section that shows which document/s it used to answer the question and the sections of those documents that data was extracted from.

Question Amplification/Generation - Digest has a ‘show more questions’ feature that generates questions it thinks might be interesting based on the question you asked, then answers those too.

Paragraph context adjustment - Digest allows the user to increase the number of paragraphs used as context by the LLM to answer your question (a function of how it processes data). A greater number of paragraphs can sometimes enhance the answer quality if there is a lot of information in the archive relevant to the question.

API - We also provide an API to your Digest archive for integration with existing systems.

Our Business Model and Pricing:
Currently a SAAS model where the subscription gets you credits that you then deplete while asking questions, any credits remaining at the end of the month get rolled over to the next month.

There are two packages for individual users. One for 3$ a month meant primarily for students but also for people to try it out without a large commitment, the other for 15$ a month. The 15$ package simply gives you more credits and a larger allowance of documents.

Some Example Use Cases:
Businesses can use the Digest API to create an archive with the relevant documents/data to provide their clients with a portal to ask questions about their business/products.
It helps lawyers do case research and quickly sift through information for legal due diligence. Want to find out how many lawsuits the company you’re researching has gone through? Just upload all their documents to Digest then ask ‘What is this company’s policy on data privacy?’
Researchers and students can use it to speed up research and learning (including using our amplification feature to generate questions from uploaded documents to find/suggest new avenues of investigation or test themselves

Our Story:
Fahamu Inc was founded in December 2022, my co-founder Brian and I each had separate motivations for starting this company. We were lucky enough to get a significant amount of idea validation straight out of the gate, the most notable validation came from a global genetics research collective that told us they’d pay for the product if they could ask questions over an archive instead of a singular document. We achieved that at the end of March and after a beta, they became our first users.
Due to our CTO, Brian Muhia’s (HN username poppingtonic) AI safety research and its influence on our company, we’ve also been somewhat involved in the AI alignment community being featured on Ravit Dotan’s podcast https://youtu.be/GuG37IalvM4 and authoring two papers: https://shorturl.at/jvKO2 and https://shorturl.at/hEZ03 the latter of which he presented here https://www.youtube.com/live/XauqlTQm-o4?feature=share

Thanks.