Atlas Informatics calls it quits after less than a year

Atlas Informatics, whose Atlas Recall promised an intuitive and powerful way to index all your information across many services, is shutting down less than a year after launch. There will be no long sunset period: all user data will be deleted next Friday, the 27th.

I wrote about the Seattle-based company last November; the idea was to create a sort of personal search engine for every email, website and Slack conversation, organizing it by name and topic while keeping things simple and secure. So you could search for “PDFs related to my bank loan” and boom, there they’d be — change “PDFs” to “contacts” and there’s your finance adviser, the customer service people from the bank and so on.

It seemed like a great idea to me, but I never got to try it — Recall was limited to Macs and iOS, neither of which I use full time. What’s the point of a perfect recall if it only covers half of what you see and do? Planned Windows and Android versions never materialized. For a product aimed at the professional world (not to say enterprise), that’s a big blind spot.

“We joined the fight because we saw information overload as a righteous cause, but we faced the ever-present challenge of fundraising,” wrote the company in a statement to users (and people like me). “With the small amount of money remaining, the company has elected to make an orderly shutdown of the business to ensure employees and user data were treated fairly.”

The company had raised $20.7 million last November, but maybe Seattle’s rising rents were too much for them. Best of luck to the team in their next journey — hopefully it’ll be a longer one.