HomeCompaniesCaptain

The Reliable Alternative to RAG

Captain delivers the most accurate general-purpose retrieval engine for unstructured data. Connect file stores and effortlessly retrieve knowledge with much higher accuracy than RAG (Avg: 78% → 95% + citations).
Active Founders
Edgar Babajanyan
Edgar Babajanyan
Co-founder and CTO
CTO @ Captain | AI Engineer and Researcher | Prev. Purdue
Lewis Polansky
Lewis Polansky
Founder
CEO @ Captain | Replacing RAG with Infinite Context Retrieval
Company Launches
Captain - The Reliable Alternative to RAG
See original launch post

TL; DR: Captain delivers the most accurate general-purpose knowledge search engine ever built.

If you need to search through large text or multimodal files, and:

  • Don’t have time for a tedious RAG sprint -or-
  • Your current search pipeline lacks accuracy

We should talk. → runcaptain.com/sales or founders@runcaptain.com

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RxMPHqou94o

In a world where 90% of enterprise knowledge cannot be stored in traditional databases, this ‘unstructured data’ is an untapped goldmine for decision-making.

The issue is that current RAG solutions have poor retrieval quality overall and are only performant on pre-optimized question types.

Captain unlocks better responses thanks to an effectively Infinite Context window. We distribute it across many LLMs in parallel + some embeddings sprinkled in, and then ‘Map-Reducing’ responses down to a single output.

Without context limits, we have great freedom to optimize our retrieval engine for maximal accuracy. We can now play with a truly dynamic top-k or just run the LLM exhaustively (if a full knowledge audit is needed).

We’re two lifelong builders obsessed with data!

  • Lewis (right) solved hallucinations for code generation through his previous startup.
  • Edgar (left) researched NLP+AI and has built production RAG pipelines for the past 3 years.

We’ve seen the pains and limits of these systems from the start, and the industry is primed for a more accurate alternative.

This past summer, we met with every engineer we could at Snowflake and Databricks, and we kept hearing the same thing again and again:

There’s no good scalable unstructured data search.

Until today.

Captain abstracts the engineering of retrieval entirely. Connecting files is all that’s needed, and we’ll beat your RAG's accuracy. Guaranteed.

Our Ask

If you know a CTO or Head of AI at a mid-market or enterprise AI-native (or are building one yourself), we would love an introduction!

Check us out at RunCaptain.com
or reach us directly through founders@runcaptain.com

Happy Shipping! 🚢

YC Photos
Captain
Founded:2025
Batch:Fall 2025
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:Garry Tan