Waverly

Waverly is a content discovery and recommendation company that builds an application aimed at professionals seeking to filter out online noise and distraction. The product organizes reading around "Waves" — themes or concepts that function as feeds — which users create to track specific industries, trends and market insights. Rather than relying on click and behavior tracking, Waverly applies natural language understanding to interpret stated user intent, an approach the company characterizes as the first transparent AI-powered natural language analysis algorithm.

Instead of sitting on top of existing social platforms, Waverly indexes its own corpus of the web. At launch this comprised 10,000 sources, including specialized publications, blogs and newsletters, with the dataset expanding as users submit additional sources. New sources are added without human curation by the company, though management has indicated some form of oversight may be required over time. The company positions user intent and constraints on how individuals can influence other users' Waves as its mechanisms against distraction, misinformation and disinformation.

Founding story

Philippe Beaudoin conceived the idea while working at Google in the 2010s as a founding engineer of the Chrome machine learning team, where his work on recommender systems and interactions with design ethicist Tristan Harris shaped his view that such systems were designed to capture attention with few controls for users. He co-founded Waverly in 2020 with CTO Philippe Gagnon, previously a technical architect at Ubisoft for more than 17 years, after co-founding Element AI.

Business model

Waverly operates a consumer and professional content application built on its own index of web sources. It offers tiered subscriptions: a Pro tier providing unlimited personalized Waves and additional features, and a Business tier that lets companies create private Waves for internal teams or publish Waves to the web.

Subscription tiers, including a paid Pro tier for individuals with unlimited personalized Waves and a Business tier for organizations.

Traction

At the time of its consumer launch, Waverly had four full-time employees, an index of 10,000 sources that expands through user submissions, and had completed an exclusive beta.

Latest developments

Waverly made its app available to consumers after roughly two years of development and beta testing, launching with 10,000 indexed sources and a four-person full-time team.