As we say farewell to 2023, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on Swirl’s journey over the past nine months and celebrate the launch of Swirl on Azure Marketplace for private cloud deployment. Swirl provides a secure platform for users to conduct simultaneous searches across all their applications, content repositories, and data for efficient information retrieval. Results can be reviewed before submitting them to the enterprise’s choice of Generative AI to unlock intelligence.

Since its launch in March, the community and team have rapidly evolved Swirl, unveiling fourteen iterations to enhance functionality and user experience. The intuitive Galaxy Search UI, seamless Microsoft 365 integration, and our innovative real-time Retrieval Augmented Generation feature include key developments. Our users now enjoy secure searches across Office 365, Salesforce, Snowflake, and numerous other data repositories. Additionally, quickly integrating private Generative AI offers an option to read, summarize, and interactively respond to search results – saving valuable time.

Since initiating our marketing in September, the response has been overwhelmingly positive: over 1,300 stars on GitHub, robust community engagement, 15k+ Docker pulls, and a Slack community surpassing 200 active users. Our presence spans 30+ countries, and we’ve captivated the attention of notable organizations and a famous Beantown university. The open-source community edition’s success has organically attracted corporate interest, validating our approach to commercializing open-source.

Our demonstration of Grounded Generation (aka RAG) with OpenAI’s GPT-4 at the ESD conference was a standout moment, spurring substantial dialogues with enterprise clients.

Looking ahead, Swirl is poised to revolutionize AI search middleware. Our unique offering preserves data integrity, allowing seamless AI access without data transfer. Our one-click Azure Marketplace integration (with subsequent expansions to AWS and GCP), will democratize access, leveraging Microsoft Azure Capacity Credits for an effortless private cloud deployment experience.

Wishing you a prosperous and joyful New Year!

Originally published on LinkedIn on 1st January 2024.