Meet Logseq, an open-source knowledge management system that ‘stores data like a brain’

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Information, as the aged declaring goes, is energy. But when that information is splayed throughout sprawling, fragmented repositories, it can be challenging for even the most structured person to be a part of the dots and make perception of it all.

This is a thing that fledgling startup Logseq is placing out to address, with a privacy-centered open up-resource awareness foundation that will help persons and businesses incorporate all their disparate notes, exploration, PDF markups and extra into an interconnected technique for storing and retrieving data.

With aid for markup languages this kind of as Markdown and Emacs’ Org-method, Logseq permits customers to produce jobs, take care of and shop notes or to-do lists, embed internet pages, annotate PDFs and develop backlinks in between all the facts contained inside of, to build a free of charge circulation of details.

Logseq is coming into a house that features incumbents these types of as Roam, Obsidian, Foam and Athens, however in actuality it is wanting to supplant legacy expertise administration techniques that are intended in a “skeuomorphic” way to mimic linear methods created close to internet pages, documents and folders. Certainly, Logseq is conceptually additional akin to a little something like a international wiki that suppliers data “like a human brain” — a graph of nodes consisting of myriad interconnected concepts. It also supports visualizations based mostly on a graph database, allowing for buyers to convey distinct jobs and sub-tasks on a graph that displays their interconnectedness.

To get factors to the future level, Logseq currently discovered that it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding from a slew of noteworthy backers, like the CEOs and founders of businesses these types of as Stripe, Shopify and Quora.

Logseq in motion

Logseq, which people can already entry via a desktop app or indigenous iPad / iOS app, can be utilized to publish and join just about any style of textual content-based mostly take note. For illustration, it can enhance be aware-taking for undertaking meetings, by means of bidirectional inbound links and graph databases on prime of easy Markdown files — this can assistance any participant revisit prior conversations and notes and use filters to pick out subject areas appropriate to the meeting.

Logseq also touts by itself as “local-first,” indicating that it supports storing information and facts in Markdown text information on users’ area machines, which provides them total, unfettered accessibility to all their information and facts. And for the reason that it supports Markdown and Org-method out-the-box, it indicates that it’s interoperable with other platforms and units.

Yet another possible use-scenario lies in PDF annotation, with Logseq enabling buyers to spotlight a chunk of textual content on the document and compose notes linked with those people highlights.

So, who, particularly, is the supposed conclude-user with Logseq? Any individual and every person, in accordance to Logseq cofounder and CEO Tienson Qin.

“Individual scientists and individuals at house by now depend on Logseq to retail outlet complicated awareness bases and own CRMs,” Qin informed VentureBeat. “SMEs and enterprise teams use Logseq to store notes for teams in ways that create deeply interconnected relationships to give more rapidly context to new hires, much more functional info management and hold a lot more detailed logs of their collective mental assumed processes.”

The tale so considerably

Qin and Co. created Logseq as an open-resource “passion project” in early 2020, while it has only existed as a formal company for the past 12 months. But in the intervening months, the organization has garnered a developing consumer foundation that incorporates builders, researchers and academics from a host of higher-profile organizations these as Google, Meta, MIT and Stanford.

“It’s a excellent system for scientists and teachers who are cataloging a whole lot of details, both equally in groups and on their own,” Qin explained to VentureBeat. “Logseq is utilized by groups at corporations who need to far better retail outlet facts in interconnected structures. Logseq’s item is developed to be so incredibly uncomplicated to use, that even younger youngsters can choose it up and start out exploring.”

In conditions of how Logseq plans to make cash past its existing donation-dependent solution, the enterprise intends to put at minimum some of its seed expenditure toward choosing and products enhancement — this interprets into quality capabilities for individuals and providers.

“We’re checking out a Logseq ‘pro’ approach for persons that would include things like close-to-conclusion encrypted sync, publishing, an AI assistant and collaboration, as perfectly as potential for enterprise designs,” Qin discussed. “But, to start with, we’re targeted on rising speedy by letting open up-source, prevalent collaboration.”

Indeed, it is this open-supply foundation that could set the company up nicely as it builds out a professional product, particularly in sectors wherever facts ownership and management are a major precedence.

“Because it is open up supply and prioritizes privateness, we have an intensive user-foundation that we do not actively monitor the identities of, which also speeds up compliance critiques,” Qin mentioned.

Also, the reality that Logseq is a neighborhood-pushed challenge signifies that contributors the entire world over can include (or request) their characteristics. Qin said that in the previous a few months on your own, the Logseq neighborhood has established extra than 80 plugins to support integrations with calendars, normal language processing (NLP) applications and even Readwise.

In the coming weeks, Logseq is gearing up to start options to better aid real-time collaboration, enabling teams to edit notes on their Logseq information graphs concurrently, a small like Google Docs.

“Logseq is wonderful at supporting groups do the job on datasets collectively — it is even greater at permitting numerous groups to function on the exact same dataset,” Qin famous. “This is because the thoughts and data contained in that dataset results in being by natural means linked in a bidirectional graph, this means group are not confined just to data files and folders, but instead logically, like a mind performs, to keep study going ahead.”

Logseq’s seed funding round provided investments from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison Shopify founder Tobias Lütke ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman Quora founder Charlie Cheever renowned program developer Dave Winer Andreessen Horowitz husband or wife Sriram Krishnan Craft Ventures Matrix Companions and Day A person Ventures.