A startup called Cloudtenna Inc. is betting on its ability to tackle the problem of “file sprawl” in enterprises after landing $4 million in a seed funding.

The round for the Sunnyvale, California-based company, announced today, was led by Blazar Ventures with participation from Citrix Systems Inc.

Cloudtenna said its first product, called DirectSearch, is infused with modern technologies including machine learning intelligence and natural language processing. According to the company, it can eliminate hundreds of hours wasted each week by workers digging through computer systems in search of misplaced files.

The company said DirectSearch can be thought of as an “all-new search engine” that can find just about any kind of document in an enterprise file system, be it the local disk drives or a service such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Slack, Sharefile or Salesforce.com.

Cloudtenna reckons there’s a big market for it, citing statistics from International Data Corp. that show the average knowledge worker spends up to 2.5 hours a day just searching for files. “Today’s workers are using literally dozens of file repositories, which has become a critical problem not only for individual productivity but for corporate IT departments and for vendors of platforms with poor reputations for ease of use,” said Bryan Pham, Cloudtenna’s founder and chief technology officer.

DirectSearch aims to resolve that mess by making it simple to search for files no matter where they’re located. Users can search across all of their company’s data repositories, according to the file name, sender, data, file type, keywords, content and numerous other attributes, with results presented in less than a second, the company claimed.

Asked how DirectSearch compares with other file search products such as SwiftType Inc.’s enterprise search tool, Pham insisted that his company’s system is more comprehensive, allowing users to search both consumer cloud apps and more obscure enterprise data sources like an on-premises windows file server. In addition, he said, DirectSearch goes one step further by personalizing the results for each individual user to surface the documents that are most relevant first.

“Did your boss recently edit a file? If so, that file is likely more relevant to you and it should be boosted in your search results ordering,” said Pham. “This is a pretty intense use case for machine learning because it means that we generate search results that are different for each and every user on your team.”

Cloudtenna said DirectSearch will be made generally available in the third quarter. Until then, it’s inviting companies to test its software through a beta access program, accessible here.

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