Data infrastructure

Captain

Website
Founded 2025Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Captain makes product catalogs and complex, multimodal files searchable for customers and AI agents. It syncs files from sources like S3, SharePoint, and Google Drive and tunes search to your data and workloads.

Instead of stitching together parsers, embeddings, vector databases, rerankers, and retrieval infrastructure, developers use Captain to power product search and file retrieval through managed APIs.

On evaluated file-search benchmarks, Captain’s tuning improved retrieval accuracy from roughly 78% with standard RAG to over 97%.

Built for complex catalogs and demanding file-search workloads, including regulated and high-stakes applications.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
LinkedIn Pricing
Data infrastructureAPI platformDevelopersDevelopersUsage & volume pricing

Customers & use cases

Used by Y Combinator, compliance teams, and engineers building agents that need reliable answers.

Source-reported As recorded 2026-10-19

Pricing

500 free indexing credits a month, then $0.02 a credit. Each file type has its own credit rate. No per-seat pricing. 1,000 free queries a month on Developer, then $0.005 each.

Source-reported As recorded 2026-11-13

Founders & team

Lewis Lien Polansky

Founder/CEO

CEO @ Captain, building self-tuning file search for AI agents. Engineer, designer, founder of a cybersecurity CTF org, recipient of U.S. Congressional recognition for community software, and randomly co-invented the soy-based milk carton.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Edgar Babajanyan

Founder/CTO

CTO @ Captain | Published AI NLP Researcher | Built OCR engines @ Boar's Head | Scaled high-performance RAG pipelines for the past 4 years | Built a Cross Region L2 Datacenter

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
2team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2025 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceA pricing page was detected
Maturity: Not assessed · 4 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding yearpricing page observedrecent publishing observed
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method