If you’re anything like me, you’ve got hundreds — maybe thousands — of AI conversations scattered across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and who knows what else. Some of them contain genuinely useful insights. Most of them? Buried forever, never to be found again. That’s exactly the problem [Nessie Labs](https://nessielabs.com/) is going after, and honestly, it’s about time someone did.
Nessie came out of [Y Combinator’s F25 batch](https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Omc-nessie-perplexity-for-your-mind), founded by Anna Zhang and Tiger Wang — two Yale CS grads and former Amazon engineers. The story goes that Anna had Gemini conversations exceeding a million tokens, way past what any model’s context window could handle. So they built a tool to solve their own problem, which is usually how the best products start.
Here’s what it actually does: you import your chat history from the major AI platforms, and Nessie distills those sprawling conversations into structured notes organized by topic. No manual tagging, no dragging things into folders yourself. It just figures out what you were thinking about and groups it accordingly. Then you can chat with a specific concept, a whole folder of notes, or your entire knowledge base at once. Think of it as Perplexity, but pointed inward at your own ideas instead of the web.
What I appreciate most is the privacy angle. Everything runs local-first — your content stays on your device, not on their servers. In a world where every app wants to slurp up your data, that’s a refreshing choice.
The traction speaks for itself. Within three weeks of launching, over 1,200 users had imported more than 300,000 AI conversations, with 30% week-over-week growth. Garry Tan (YC’s CEO) even [posted about using it as his second brain](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garrytan_ive-been-using-nessie-as-my-2nd-brain-activity-7392321730557468672-Wjoo), which is about as strong an endorsement as a YC company can get. The launch blew up on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/y-combinator_nessie-labs-turns-your-scattered-chatgpt-activity-7392319883167920128-y1a3) and the YC community, and you can follow their updates on [X/Twitter](https://x.com/NessieLabs) too.
Right now it’s a Mac desktop app in private beta. If you’ve been feeling like your AI conversations are a goldmine you can’t access, Nessie might be exactly what you need. It’s one of those tools that makes you wonder why it didn’t exist sooner.
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