Sirch

Mika grew up in a fishing village in northern Sweden where the nearest library was a 45-minute bus ride. The internet was her library. She taught herself to code at 14, got a scholarship to KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and by 22 was running a search quality team at one of the world's largest tech companies.

She lasted three years. “The moment I realized that my job was to make people click more — not find more — I knew I had to leave,” she says. She quit without a plan, flew to New York with two suitcases, and started sketching what would become Sirch on napkins at a café in Williamsburg.

Mika doesn't use a smartphone. She carries a flip phone and a notebook. “If I can't find the answer on Sirch from a laptop, we haven't built it right yet.” She drinks six cups of black coffee a day and can name every species of fish in the Baltic Sea.

Tomás was born in Medellín, Colombia, raised in Miami, and educated at MIT, where he published his first paper on neural information retrieval at age 20. His PhD advisor called him “the most annoyingly talented student I've ever had.”

Before Sirch, Tomás spent four years at a stealth AI lab building language models for scientific research. He left when he realized the models were being used primarily to generate marketing copy. “I trained a system that could read every paper ever written about protein folding, and they used it to write email subject lines,” he says, still visibly annoyed.

He met Mika at a AI meetup in Brooklyn where she cornered him for two hours about real-time page comprehension. He started building a prototype that night. By morning, he had a working demo. He hasn't stopped since. Tomás sleeps in the office three nights a week and has strong opinions about mechanical keyboards. His current daily driver has 42 keys and sounds like a tiny thunderstorm.

Priya is the reason Sirch looks like nothing else on the internet. Trained as an architect at the Bartlett School in London, she pivoted to digital design after realizing she could reach more people through screens than buildings. She spent five years at a legendary design agency in Tokyo, where she led the redesign of three of Japan's most-used mobile apps.

Her design philosophy is radical minimalism: “Every pixel that doesn't help you find what you're looking for is a pixel that's in your way.” She removed over 200 UI elements during Sirch's development. The team called her “The Eraser.” She took it as a compliment.

The dot was her idea. So was the color-changing. So was the idea that the search bar should feel like a blank page, not a form field. Priya meditates for an hour every morning, practices calligraphy in the evening, and has never once used dark mode. “Design should work in the light,” she says.

Jin-Soo is the reason Sirch is fast. Terrifyingly fast. He previously built the real-time data pipeline for one of Korea's largest gaming platforms, processing 2.3 million events per second with 99.99% reliability. When he tells you a system won't go down, it doesn't go down.

Born in Seoul, Jin-Soo moved to San Francisco at 25 and immediately hated it. “Everyone talks about changing the world but nobody can make a server respond in under 100 milliseconds,” he complained to anyone who would listen. He found his people at Sirch.

Jin-Soo's infrastructure serves search results from 14 edge locations worldwide. He hand-optimized every database query. He wrote a custom connection pooler that reduced latency by 40%. His proudest achievement is that the average Sirch response time is 0.3 seconds, and he considers that “embarrassingly slow.” He's working on getting it under 0.1.

Outside of work, Jin-Soo is a competitive speed-cuber. His personal best for a 3x3 Rubik's cube is 8.7 seconds. He says solving cubes and optimizing systems use the exact same part of his brain.

Amara holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Stanford, where her dissertation on “contextual relevance in multi-document summarization” was cited 847 times before she finished defending it. She's the brain behind Sirch's ability to read a page and extract exactly the part that answers your question.

Raised in Lagos and London, Amara speaks five languages and can explain transformer architecture to a five-year-old. (“It's like if you could read every book in the library at the same time, but you had a highlighter that only lit up the parts about dinosaurs, because that's what you asked about.”)

Before Sirch, she turned down offers from four major AI labs. “They wanted me to make chatbots more engaging,” she says. “I wanted to make information more accessible. There's a difference.” She joined Sirch after a single phone call with Mika that lasted four hours.

Amara runs a mentorship program for young women in AI across West Africa. She's also an amateur potter and makes all the mugs in the Sirch office. Every mug has a different Nigerian proverb on it. Tomás's says: “The person who asks questions doesn't lose their way.”

Leo is the reason Sirch can read any page on the internet in under a second. A former competitive programmer from Turin, Italy, he won three consecutive gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics before turning 18. He dropped out of Politecnico di Torino because “they were teaching algorithms I'd already improved on.”

Leo built Sirch's crawling engine from scratch. It can fetch, parse, and extract meaningful content from any webpage in 340 milliseconds on average. It handles paywalls, JavaScript-rendered content, PDFs, and even some formats that technically shouldn't work. “The web is chaos,” he says. “My job is to make sense of chaos.”

He processes 47 million pages per day and has personally written parsers for over 400 different website layouts. When a page doesn't parse correctly, he takes it as a personal insult. He once stayed up for 36 hours straight to fix a bug that affected 0.003% of crawls. “That's 1,400 pages,” he said. “1,400 people didn't get their answer.”

Leo makes fresh pasta every Sunday and insists that the team joins. He says making pasta and building parsers are the same thing: “You take raw material, you shape it, you make something nourishing.” His carbonara has been called “life-altering” by multiple team members.

Zara is the voice of the user. Literally. Before every feature ships, she sits in a room with 10 random people and watches them use it. No guidance. No hints. If they can't figure it out in 5 seconds, it gets redesigned. She has killed more features than she's shipped, and she's proud of it.

Born in Vancouver, raised in Shanghai, educated at RISD and then Harvard Business School, Zara has the unusual combination of aesthetic sensibility and ruthless product instincts. She previously led product at a meditation app that reached 30 million users, where she learned that “the best product is the one people use without thinking about it.”

Zara runs all of Sirch's user research. She's conducted over 500 user interviews in the past year alone. She can predict with 90% accuracy whether a person will find what they're looking for within the first 3 seconds of watching them search. She calls it “the moment of intent” — that split second when someone's eyes either light up or glaze over.

In her spare time, Zara is a competitive ballroom dancer. She says product design and dancing have the same core principle: “Lead without forcing. The best experiences feel like you're choosing, even when you're being guided.”

Right now, most of your decisions are based on the first result that seems good enough. You're not finding the best answer — you're finding the first acceptable one. Sirch shows you what every page actually says, so you can compare real information instead of headlines. Your decisions get better because your information gets better.

When you're researching something new, you currently spend 80% of your time navigating and 20% learning. Sirch inverts that ratio. You spend your time reading AI summaries of what pages actually say, not clicking through them one by one. A research session that used to take an hour takes six minutes. We've measured it.

Information overload is a real thing. It's why you feel exhausted after an hour of Googling even though you're just sitting in a chair. Your brain is doing thousands of micro-evaluations: Is this link relevant? Is this page trustworthy? Where's the actual answer? Sirch removes all of that cognitive overhead. The answer is right there. Your brain can relax.

Remember when you used to go down rabbit holes for fun? When one question led to another and you'd look up and realize three hours had passed? That stopped happening because search became a chore. Sirch makes it effortless again. We've seen users search for 3X more queries per session — not because they have to, but because they want to. Each result opens a door instead of closing one.

This is the big one. Our data shows that Sirch users save an average of 23 minutes per day compared to traditional search. That's 140 hours a year. That's three and a half work weeks. That's a vacation. That's learning a new language. That's writing a book. That's time you'll never get from a search engine that makes you click ten links to find one answer.

The internet used to feel like a miracle. An infinite library at your fingertips. Then it got buried under ads, SEO spam, AI-generated garbage, and dark patterns designed to waste your time. Sirch cuts through all of it. When you hover over a result, you see what the page actually says — not what it's optimized to make you think it says. Truth becomes the default again.