02 — THE STORY
Founded by the people who kept getting asked.
In 2023, Elena Marsh was the person at her company who "just knew things." Fourteen years across product and operations meant every hard question eventually landed in her inbox. She kept a private document of answers. It reached 400 pages. It was still never quite what anyone needed.
Her co-founder, Tomas Lindqvist, had spent a decade building search infrastructure and arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: search was the wrong model for organizational knowledge. People don't want ten links. They want one answer they can trust — which means an answer that shows its work.
Noema started as a weekend prototype that read one Slack workspace and one Drive folder and refused to say anything it couldn't cite. The refusal turned out to be the product. Today it serves teams from 10 to 10,000 people, and the founding rule hasn't changed: no claim without a source.
