Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

[5] In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007. Business Week said: "The company hopes the site will marshal thousands of people to help build and improve its search engine before it goes public next year.

Powerset doesn’t have a product yet, but rather a collection of promising natural language technologies, which are the fruit of years of research at Xerox PARC.

Pell received his Bachelor of Science degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar.

[12] He has worked at NASA, as chief strategist and vice president of business development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000) and at Whizbang!

Prior to joining Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.

[13] Ronald Kaplan, former manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology at PARC, served as the company's CTO and CSO.