Draft:Guru (software company)

Guru is a software-as-a-service company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The company was founded in 2013 by Rick Nucci and Mitchell Stewart.

In 2023, it announced an increased focus on building applications with generative AI capabilities.

History
Guru was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in late 2013 by Rick Nucci and Mitchell Stewart.

Prior to Guru, Nucci was co-founder and CTO at Boomi, which develops cloud computing software and was originally headquartered in Philadelphia –a fact that often surprised prospective investors, as Nucci told Wired in 2012.

Boomi was acquired by Dell in 2010, after which Nucci joined the Dell team before leaving to start Guru.

In September 2015, Guru publicly launched its product and announced that it had raised a seed round of $2.7M. Two years later, in September 2017, Guru raised $9.3M in series A funding led by Emergence Capital. At the time Nucci said, "Today, Guru is a system where you can search and find answers to solve customer problems or get answers to questions. Tomorrow, the vision is that Guru brings you that information as you need it, and that’s the promise of machine learning.”

In December 2018, Guru raised $25m in series B funding, led by Thrive Capital and with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, FirstMark Capital, Slack, and Michael Dell’s MSD Capital.

The company raised a series C round of $30M in April 2020. At the time, Accel Partners Miles Clements and Ben Fletcher wrote,“We’ve had the pleasure of knowing Rick and Mitch for a few years, though the product resonates with us now more deeply than ever.”

Products
In 2015, not long after Guru’s public launch, TechCrunch described the product as, “A [Google] Chrome web extension that sits on top of pretty much anything you do on your computer, and intelligently surfaces the relevant information about your startup right when you need it.” At the time, Guru’s product allowed users to document information in the form of cards, which are stored in a centralized system. Each card is verified by a specific employee or team, ensuring that it’s kept up to date. Information stored in Guru is accessible via integrations with Google Chrome, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Slack, and other popular applications.

Guru’s product evolved since then, and in May 2023, the company announced the addition of generative AI capabilities that allow employees to search for information in other applications and get AI-generated answers to their questions. Upon announcement, KMWorld described the capability as follows,“By searching documents, messaging tools, knowledge bases, and any application connected to Guru, Answers delivers a response to a user query. As soon as information is connected to Guru, the data is verified and enhanced over time by subject-matter experts, ensuring long-lasting, accurate knowledge generation.”

Within four months of its launch in May 2023, Guru’s AI search had been used by over 2,000 companies.

Companies primarily use Guru as a wiki, intranet, enterprise search solution, knowledge base, knowledge management platform, or a combination of these.

Company Culture
Guru’s CEO Rick Nucci has spoken regularly about the importance of company culture. In 2023 he told CNBC about the positive impact radical candor has had at Guru. Reflecting on the role of radical candor in Guru's culture, he said,“I believe it [radical candor] has made our culture stronger, strengthened the way our teams collaborate, and helped us to better serve our customers.”

In 2019, Nucci was named on Glassdoor’s list of the top 50 CEOs at Small & Medium Companies.

Awards and Recognition
In July 2022 Guru was named on Forbes’s list of America’s Best Startup Employers.

Later that year, in December, Guru’s CTO Mitchell Stewart was named as ‘CTO of the Year’ by Technical.ly, along with Sarah Foss.