Science & Technology Angels Network (STAN) · Jun 2026
STAN announced an investment in Captain and named Y Combinator, Handshake Ventures, Edison Capital, a16z Scout, and Theo Browne among the backers.
Company research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Jul 30, 2026
Overview
Captain is a YC Winter 2026 startup building an API-first, multimodal enterprise knowledge search engine for AI agents. It positions itself as a managed, more accurate alternative to DIY RAG pipelines and emphasizes citations, broad data connectors, and enterprise readiness.
Primary product
Multimodal knowledge search / managed RAG platform for AI agents
Founded
2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
1-10
Industry
Data Infrastructure and Analytics
Sub-industry
AI search / RAG infrastructure
Offices
San Francisco, California, United States
Business model
SaaS
API
usage-based pricing
enterprise software
custom enterprise / BYOC deployments
Funding
Stage
Pre-Seed
Total raised
$500K
Latest round
Pre-Seed · Nov 2025
Latest amount
$500K
Nov 2025 · Y Combinator
People & investors
Work & culture
Publicly, the company presents as engineering-heavy, accuracy-first, and enterprise-focused, with an emphasis on shipping a managed infrastructure layer rather than hand-built RAG systems.
Product & market
Pricing
Free tier plus subscription tiers, with startup pricing, usage credits/overages, and custom enterprise/BYOC pricing.
Differentiators
- —Claims ~95% retrieval accuracy versus ~78% for standard RAG
- —Single API that abstracts indexing, retrieval, OCR, embeddings, and reranking
- —Multimodal search across text, images, video, and audio
- —Broad connector support across major cloud and SaaS sources
- —Citations returned automatically
- —SOC 2 / trust-center posture
- —Enterprise BYOC / on-prem option
- —Captain Odyssey private market dataset offering
Technology
OCR
multimodal embeddings
hybrid keyword + semantic search
reranking
Markdown conversion pipeline
Rust vector + full-text search engine
Python SDK
MCP server
Gemini 3 Pro
Voyage contextual embeddings
Voyage rerank-2.5
Reducto OCR
Extend OCR
Customers
Enterprise AI teams
CTOs and Heads of AI
Mid-market companies
Enterprise companies
AI-native companies
Teams migrating from DIY RAG or Ragie
Competitors
Ragie
Glean
Elasticsearch
Gemini File Search
Pinecone
Weaviate
DIY RAG stacks
Scale & contact
Latest news
Hacker News
Launch discussion for Captain’s automated file-RAG product, with the founders describing the system as simplifying unstructured data search and indexing cloud/SaaS sources.
Y Combinator
YC launch page framing Captain as a managed alternative to DIY RAG, emphasizing accuracy gains, infinite-context style retrieval, and enterprise sales outreach.
Captain blog
Product migration guidance for customers moving from Ragie to Captain, indicating active competitive displacement and onboarding support.
Captain blog
The blog index references a Captain v2 launch and March 2026 platform updates, suggesting ongoing product iteration and release activity.
Jobs and careers at Captain
0 jobs at Captain
No open positions
Check back later for new openings