Project summary

At scry.io, I make the internet programmatically searchable. I maintain a large web index, and instead of doing what traditional search engines do, which is have a black-box function between essentially (keywords, strings, dates, boolean_operators) -> top_k_results that is applied to their search index, I give the user SQLProgram -> relation<row> and essentially raw access to the underlying data. This makes it trivial to do idea history mining like answering "has mechanistic interpretability writing gotten more optimistic over time" or "Which forum and mailing-list communities used a technical phrase first, and which comments carried it forward?" A SQL query over this index can actually dynamically compute and adjust search terms and what it is tabulating as it traverses billions of documents.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

I want to have a very strong index of all the remotely important signal relevant to the far future going well, and I want thousands of people taking the intelligence explosion seriously to have a research tool they prefer using on a daily basis.

I achieve this by talking with my users, deeply leveraging terminal coding agents, and soon, putting my APIs through external benchmarks to build up social clarity about capabilities.

How will this funding be used?

$20k retroactive for unpaid full-time work Dec 2025–Jul 2026

$2500/month x 12 months = $30k runway for datacenter colocation costs for hosting Scry for ~EA.

$5k monthly cloud compute costs x 3 months = $15k cloud compute runway.

$2k x 12 months AI subscriptions = $24k for addressing user needs and software maintenance.

4 x 60 TB NVMe drives at $6k each = $24k for 240 TB more of performant storage.

2 x RTX 5090s at $5k each = $10k for more embedding, OCR, and rerank functionality.

$5k x 12 months stipend = $60k. I have a good chance of success with cracking B2B sales while staying on the pure long-term path of delivering deeper infra for ~EA, so the modest stipend reflects that.

$183k total.

$20k minimum. Below full funding I allocate at my own discretion--most likely the retroactive compensation first, then pooling toward colocation. My true funding ceiling is above $183k, because mirrored servers and contractors buy superlinear returns on how fast this community can react during the intelligence explosion.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I've been working solo and have already shipped much of this functionality. The API is live, reliable, and users can run long-running programs over 130B records. People have paid for it repeatedly even on the far slower earlier infrastructure.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The most likely failure mode is that Scry remains technically strong but does not achieve enough sustained adoption or revenue quickly enough to cover its infrastructure costs. In that case I would scale costs down and preserve the most valuable public-access functionality.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

I have raised $5k from one angel investor. The money that went to the minimum viable server hardware was unconditionally gifted.