By Allan Maurer
COLUMBIA, SC—Collexis Inc., a search engine company finding customers in biopharmaceutical research, universities, health care and government, just completed a reverse merger, the first step in creating a publically traded company.
The privately-funded company says it has merged with a public shell company, and filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Feb. 14.
CEO Bill Kirkland explains that Collexis does a conceptual search that identifies ideas or concepts it can search in any language. A search for “water” will also find any reference to “aqua” or “H2O,” for instance.
In a Collexis search, the more words you put in, the smaller and more accurate your results will be. It can be searched with sentences, articles, or even a book’s worth of information. It then returns a “fingerprint” or conceptual map of the information.
“We’re a knowledge discovery platform rather than search,” says Kirkland. “We build unique applications.”
The Collexis system works with public or private content. It’s smart enough to recognize synonyms, homonyms, can identify core ideas in a document “the things you would highlight in a college text as key ideas,” Kirkland says.
Once the system indexes a given body of information, it can do things such as show all the patents a company has or all the papers a researcher wrote, and compare and contrast patents held by two different companies, or the expertise of two authors.
“You can go as deep as you want,” says Kirkland. “You can ask it to show you the top global experts who research Alzheimer’s related to atherosclerosis and get a nonbiased view. It gives you a way to make large blocks of information intelligent and readable so you can turn the knowledge into action.”
David Blake, Ph.D., former executive vice dean for research Johns Hopkins University, said in a testimonial, “A primary tenet of academic research is obtaining data, converting it into information, and then transforming that information into knowledge.
“With that in mind, I believe that Collexis is THE major enabler of this progression. They have streamlined the discovery process, to a handful of mouse clicks.”
One of its most advanced features, hypothesis generation, can take a large set of documents and make suggestions regarding the relationship between chemicals and drugs or in the intelligence field, between groups and organizations.
It can create structure from unstructured materials.
The company was founded in 1999 in the Netherlands and started U.S. operations in Columbia, SC in January 2006. Kirkland says the company spent more than $8 million on research and development. While it has not released revenue figures, they will be available as the company goes public.
Collexis clients include the National Institutes of Health, World Health Organization, U.S. Department of Defense, Lockheed Martin, Harvard, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Johns Hopkins University, the University of South Carolina, and Stanford University, among others.
Kirkland says the company sees opportunities in legal markets, where attorneys could paste a patent application in the Collexis search to see what’s relevant in patent databases among other possibilities. It also sees China is an appealing market due to the product’s cross-language capabilities.
It also sees financial markets such as hedge funds and currency markets, intelligence agencies, and Fortune 500 consulting firms as potential clients.
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