Roundup has shut down.
Roundup was an AI-powered workplace search engine. We helped knowledge workers find answers across their scattered tools — Slack, Drive, Jira, Notion, and 30+ others — without digging through each one individually.
We built a RAG pipeline before "RAG" was a buzzword, solved document-level access control (the hardest problem in enterprise search), and served 2,000+ users across 15+ companies.
What I learned building this:
- Enterprise sales cycles are brutal when you're burning personal runway
- Permissions in enterprise search isn't a feature — it's the entire product. We underestimated how much of our engineering time would go into getting this right
- The "AI search" market went from "nobody gets it" to "everyone's building it" in about 6 months. Timing matters more than founders like to admit
- Building something technically hard doesn't mean you've built something people will pay for fast enough
Thanks to everyone who believed in this early — our users, the team, and the friends who beta-tested broken demos at odd hours.
— Manas