Concepts
Key concepts to understand when working with Ragen AI.
Projects
A project is a self-contained knowledge base. It has:
- Documents — Files you upload (PDF, DOCX, Markdown, CSV, XLSX, images, URLs, and more)
- Instructions — Custom system prompts that define how the AI should behave for this project
- API keys — Each API key is scoped to a single project
When a user asks a question through the API, the AI searches the project's document collection for relevant information and uses it to generate an answer.
Document processing
When you upload a document to a project:
- The file is uploaded to secure cloud storage
- A background worker parses the content and splits it into chunks
- Each chunk is converted to a vector embedding
- Embeddings are stored in a vector database for fast similarity search
Supported file types: PDF, DOCX, EPUB, Markdown, TXT, CSV, XLSX, SRT (subtitles), Images (JPG, PNG, WebP), and URLs.
Organizations
An organization is the top-level container. It holds:
- Members with role-based access (owner, admin, member)
- Projects with their own knowledge bases
- API keys for programmatic access
- Connectors to external services (Google Drive, HubSpot, etc.)
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Ragen uses RAG to ensure AI responses are grounded in your actual documents:
- Retrieval — When a question is asked, the system finds the most relevant document chunks using vector similarity search
- Reranking — Retrieved chunks are reranked using a cross-encoder model (Cohere Rerank) for better precision
- Generation — The AI model receives the relevant chunks as context and generates an answer based on them
This approach prevents hallucination and ensures answers cite your real data.
Access control
Document visibility
| Scenario | Who can see |
|---|---|
| Organization-wide file (no owner) | All organization members |
| User-owned file | File owner + org admins + explicit shares |
| Team folder | Team members + org admins |
| Shared file/folder | Users and teams with explicit permissions |
API key scope
Each API key accesses exactly one project. The key cannot read documents from other projects, even within the same organization.