YHK - yet another hacker news clone

37 points ymarkov 3 hours ago 17 comments

Hi HN, we’re Yarik and Vlad from VOYGR (https://voygr.tech/), working on better real-world place intelligence for app developers and agents. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNIpcWIE0n4.

Google Maps can tell you a restaurant is "4.2 stars, open till 10." Their API can't tell you the chef left last month, wait times doubled, and locals moved on. Maps APIs today just give you a fixed snapshot. We're building an infinite, queryable place profile that combines accurate place data with fresh web context like news, articles, and events.

Vlad worked on the Google Maps APIs as well as in ridesharing and travel. Yarik led ML/Search infrastructure at Apple, Google, and Meta powering products used by hundreds of millions of users daily. We realized nobody was treating place data freshness as infrastructure, so we're building it.

We started with one of the hardest parts - knowing whether a place is even real. Our Business Validation API (https://github.com/voygr-tech/dev-tools) tells you whether a business is actually operating, closed, rebranded, or invalid. We aggregate multiple data sources, detect conflicting signals, and return a structured verdict. Think of it as continuous integration, but for the physical world.

The problem: ~40% of Google searches and up to 20% of LLM prompts involve local context. 25-30% of places churn every year. The world doesn't emit structured "I closed" events - you have to actively detect it. As agents start searching, booking, and shopping in the real world, this problem gets 10x bigger - and nobody's building the infrastructure for it. We recently benchmarked how well LLMs handle local place queries (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366423) - the results were bad: even the best gets 1 in 12 local queries wrong

We're processing tens of thousands of places per day for enterprise customers, including leading mapping and tech companies. Today we're opening API access to the developer community. Please find details here: https://github.com/voygr-tech/dev-tools

We'd love honest feedback - whether it's about the problem, our approach, or where you think we're wrong. If you're dealing with stale place data in your own products, we'd especially love to hear what breaks. We're here all day, AMA.

il 3 hours ago | parent

I like the agent-first signup via API. Is this meant to be distributed as an agent skill?

ymarkov 2 hours ago | parent

Indeed, in the current age we need to build things for agents first. We think that the skills will primarily will be discovered through marketplaces or via web search

macrolet 2 hours ago | parent

Who are your customers? Consumer or business?

ymarkov 2 hours ago | parent

Both - we're building APIs ultimately designed for AI agents and LLMs that need trustworthy place data and that includes cases from enterprise to personal people's agents

acombandrew 2 hours ago | parent

This is a great idea, albeit one that will be really hard to pull off well but really valuable for developers if you're able to execute.

Definitely kind of a boil-the-ocean high-schlep startup but I would love to see this succeed.

ymarkov 2 hours ago | parent

Thanks, it is going to be fun! :)

deepdarkforest 2 hours ago | parent

Its quite funny that you are building an "infinite place profile", you both worked on products used by 100s of millions of people, and yet your website is down from 45 minutes of HN traffic!

Joking, but its a very good idea. Synchronization between the physical world information and digital has been a very hard problem for decades and im sure an agentic approach can 10x the value.

ymarkov 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks! Was it truly down? I have checked and I don't see any disruptions

amir_karbasi 2 hours ago | parent

Really cool! We're currently using map and web searches in our agent to gather this info for our tool. Does it support an approximate address? For example, if a plaza can have multiple street numbers, do I need to make a request for each possible address or would it find a certain business with an approximate address?

ymarkov 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks! Our initial API works as follows - you provide POI/business name and its address and we are telling you if it exists or not. So if you are looking to check if the plaza is existing, you just need to provide its supposed address. If it is a business within plaza, then an address of that business is required

frankdenbow 2 hours ago | parent

Implementing maps into our app so giving this a shot. How does pricing compare to google maps api?

ymarkov 1 hour ago | parent

It is on par with Google Maps API, but Google gives you more data. Our terms of service are more flexible - for instance we don't require attribution and deleting our data past 30 days. And we are actively working on adding more info to our APIs

thesiti92 1 hour ago | parent

what kinds of data quality evals do you guys use now? i'm curious to try integrating it

ymarkov 1 hour ago | parent

We are using judges with LLMs and web grounding plus manual grading. We recently did a benchmark on the LLM quality across major AI providers - we plan to open source it soon and will probably open source our API quality check benchmark too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366423

dk8996 1 hour ago | parent

We work in this space and have found that, very often, the realities on the ground do not match the digital information, especially when it comes to geospatial data, where businesses exist, what businesses actually exist, and their status. At Rwazi, we have millions of users helping collect on-the-ground data.

bravura 41 minutes ago | parent

Bog-standard LLM mapping is terrible and I recently added Google Maps to my personal agent to remediate this.

I'd love to try Voygr for fun. Is there a skill defined that I could just swap in Voygr

maelito 16 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure I understand : how can you product help for opening times or pictures of my local boulangerie ? What kind of data sources will help you automate the reviewing of its attributes ?