We set out to build a database. We built the engine instead.
Thistle Intelligence wasn't planned in a boardroom. It came out of a practical engineering problem, and a realization about what we'd actually built to solve it.
Talk to usA database for home-automation gear
The original project was narrow: a central place to track compatibility, reviews, and specifications for home-automation products. The immediate problem was scale — how do you populate and maintain a dataset that big, and that constantly changing, without an army of people doing it by hand? The answer was to build an intelligent crawling and processing engine that could do it instead.
The engine mattered more than the database
Building that engine forced a realization: the thing we'd built to solve one problem was more valuable than the problem itself. The ability to take in any digital asset — a webpage, a document, a data feed — and run it through layers of AI to parse, classify, and understand it wasn't specific to home automation. It was a universal capability. The home-automation database was just the first thing we happened to point it at.
- The realization: "Inputs to Insights" — any input, resolved into an answer
- The shift: from one product to a platform other problems could be pointed at
- The result: Thistle Intelligence, built on what the engine turned out to be
Talk to us about where the engine points next.
The platform grew out of one specific problem. We're glad to talk through whether it can solve yours.