Highspot CEO Robert Wahbe
Highspot CEO Robert Wahbe

One of the biggest challenges an organization can face is making it possible for the right hand to know what the left hand is doing. While it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page at a three-person company, it’s a lot harder to make sure everyone is working from the same knowledge base at a larger organization.

That’s where Highspot aims to make a difference. The company, started by longtime Microsoft exec Robert Wahbe, just released its cloud platform for companies looking to better centralize their internal knowledge. In a blog post introducing its service, Wahbe said that Highpoint came about because the team members have worked for organizations where things would have gone much better if employees had access to the combined knowledge of the company.

“The information existed to make the organizations smarter, but it simply wasn’t available to the people who needed it, when they needed it,” he wrote.

To solve that problem, Highspot is employing machine learning technology to try and provide employees with as much relevant context and information as possible. The service hoovers up all kinds of information, including documents, spreadsheets, news alerts and audio files, and processes it. When users go looking for a certain piece of information, they’re not only able to find it, but they are also able to gain necessary context about what they’re looking at.

Seattle-based angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, who doesn’t have a financial stake in the company, has been advising Highspot as the company moves towards releasing its product. He sees a lot of potential

“There is a huge opportunity to bring machine learning to existing software categories,” he said in an email to GeekWire. “Highspot is applying Internet-scale machine learning to knowledge management, an eternal problem many have tackled but no one has really nailed.”

The company has already landed early customers, including Parallels, Buuteeq and Lenati. Highspot’s service is available at a basic level for free, and users can sign up for a free 30-day trial of the company’s more advanced Business tier, which then costs $20 per user per month.

Wahbe spent 16 years at Microsoft, serving as corporate vice president of product management in the Server and Tools Division. A SEC filing from last summer indicated that the company had raised $2.25 million in financing.

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