Ness Computing is a personal search company. It was founded in October 2009 by Corey Reese, [1] Paul Twohey,[2] Nikhil Raghavan,[3] and Steven Schlansker. [4] The company is headquartered in Los Altos, California.
The company, whose mission is to make search personal, is sometimes referred to as the "Palantir for fun". It aims to help people make decisions about dining, nightlife, entertainment, shopping, music, travel and more. The company refers to its technology as the "Likeness Engine", a combination of a recommendation engine that uses machine learning to look at data from social networks including Facebook and Foursquare, and a traditional search engine that serves up results based on these signals.
The company has 15 employees.[5] Corey Reese serves as CEO and Co-founder.[6] The company's machine learning division is led by Dr. Jeremy Schiff,[7] who was previously President and Co-Founder of Fotoflexer, and its mobile engineering division is led by Scott Goodson,[8] an original member of and senior engineer on Apple’s iOS team.
Ness Computing launched its flagship application, simply called Ness, on the App Store (iOS) on August 25, 2011.
Ness has received numerous awards and distinctions. Three months after its launch, Ness Computing was named to an unofficial list of startups that Goldman Sach thought most likely to IPO. Ness has been featured by Apple Inc. in the App Store (iOS), named to The Best iPhone Apps by Gizmodo, nominated for The Five Best Restaurant Discovery Apps by Lifehacker, nominated for Best Social App and Best Food Locator App by the 2011 Toque Magazine Food App Awards, and more.
Prior to its launch, Ness Computing closed a $5 million (USD) Series A[9] round of financing in November 2010 led by Vinod Khosla and Ramy Adeeb of Khosla Ventures, with participation from Alsop Louie Partners, TomorrowVentures, Bullpen Capital, Joe Lonsdale of Palantir Technologies, and several angel investors.
Ness Computing's website is likeness.com.