Introducing Graphlan: AI Powered Usage Of Your Professional Network

What if you could take your network anywhere?

Happy Sunday and welcome to Investing In AI! I’m Rob May, CEO at Brandguard. I also run the AI Innovators Community, and AI Innovators Podcast. Today’s post is different from my usual fare. Today I want to focus not on an industry trend or idea about AI but a practical application by a company I helped co-found (I use that term loosely - it’s about a 1-2 hour commitment a week for me as others have done almost all the work).

About a year and a half ago, I was talking with some friends about the problems of LinkedIn. It really should be an open API so that people could build whatever applications they want on top of it, and users could take their network to any application they use. Your network should be more like a utility, and some company should manage that utility for all apps that want to use it, to control the rules of interaction and keep it up and running at scale for everyone. The problem that keeps coming up is - how do you get started when you don’t have the network?

We found a use case in founders and early investors. So I want to introduce Graphlan, which is debuting this week with it’s alpha launch. Here is what makes Graphlan unique:

• It ingests your contacts via LinkedIn, and/or Gmail, and provides an AI based search that works much better than other things you can find on the market. It does well for use cases like “who do I know in New York that has AI experience and has worked in the Fintech industry?”

• It allows you to add custom metrics to user profiles that only you see, and can search on. I can create a metric like “entrepreneurial” and score users myself, then add that term to a search to make it even more effective and build better data sets for the AI.

• It is super easy to create and share lists of contacts, to create joint lists, and to manage those contact lists. This is useful for planning events, running a founder led sales process in an early stage company, or finding co-investors for an angel around. It’s my favorite feature and I’ve been using it personally for weeks now.

• And finally and most importantly, the model is to allow an open API where anyone can build on Graphlan provided they follow the rules and don’t spam. We believe users should be able to bring their network to any application, as long as that application doesn’t abuse access to the network. Instead of getting the crappy LinkedIn experience you get with one sales navigator or recruiting tool built on top of the network, there can be dozens built on Graphlan, allowing different user experiences, vertical market targets, and more. This competition should make the whole ecosystem of your business network better. While the API has not launched yet, you can request early access if you tell us about your app.

Graphlan is the best tool I’ve used in years and has already become a staple of many network related workflows for me. The data it’s collecting should power some interesting new features in the AI related business network space.

The company is raising a pre-seed round, and hiring! So if either is of interest to you, please reach out. But most importantly, I hope you will go try out the tool and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.