By Allan Maurer
JACKSONVILLE, FL—Something like 80 percent of corporate data resides in text documents and other human-friendly but unstructured databases, according to analysts at Gartner. Ix Reveal is finding success selling a plug-in product called uReveal that automatically reads such data for concepts, trends, patterns, and relationships and anomalies.
Originally called intelligenxia when founded in 2000, the company has a typical startup story, but believes its product is unique, and says some top analysts agree.
Co-founder Ren Mohan and his wife started the company in the den of their house.
Mohan, now co-chair and chief technical officer of IxReveal, tells TechJournal South, “I used to consult for companies, working for McDonald’s and others, and found out that while there were processes and products to handle structured data such as numbers and codes, there was no way to handle text or human friendly unstructured data.”
So, he bought some used laptops from the local university and started coding and testing the code. Then, he presented a paper at a conference organized by TiE and Silicon India Magazine. He had a working prototype of the product, which aroused some investor interest.
The fledgling company then moved into the Jacksonville Enterprise Center, where Charles Clarkson, now CEO and co-chair of IxReveal, was chair. At another TiE conference in Santa Clara, CA, which showcases emerging tech companies, IxReveal won the “Best Software” of the showcase.
Ahead of the marketplace
Clarkson, who had written a $5,000 check so the company could go to the Santa Clara event, saw its performance there as additional validation.
Clarkson joined the company, invested, and helped move its initial focus to the law enforcement, government and insurance sectors.
So far, Clarkson says, investors have put something under $10 million in the 12-employee company. “We expect to be looking for investments,” he adds. “Ren developed this a little ahead of the marketplace.”
Although the company can enhance searches, making them more specific and effective, “We’re not a search company,” Clarkson emphasizes. “You can customize your search and just search relevant databases and analyze their data rather than use Google’s shotgun approach,” he explains.
On the sales side, the company is pursuing a partner strategy. “We’re aggressively pursuing partners who can help us in verticals where we’ve had good success rather than developing a huge sales force,” Clarkson says.
Its major focus right now is in the law enforcement space, where it has had successful installations in the Jacksonville Sheriff’s office, and financial services where it helps fraud detection, and the intelligence community.
“The success we’ve had with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s department is rippling nicely,” notes Clarkson. “But we’re now using it on a broader level that connects to the homeland security area. A recent study concluded that while not all criminals are terrorists, all terrorists are criminals. So homeland security needs to improve its relationship with law enforcement.”
It also sees a huge market in the fraud and recovery space. “Just that one area is huge,” Clarkson notes.
One major global insurance giant that used the product says using the product it saved $1.5 million in just two months by identifying red flags.
A law enforcement organization that used it says, “IxReveal made our crime analysts ridiculously more efficient. It changed our efforts from 90 percent reading and 10 percent analysis to 10 percent reading and 90 percent analysis.”
The product can also help companies examine customer email for “sentiment analysis,” pinpointing areas where customers have complaints or concerns that need to be addressed. A financial institution used IxReveal to automate the monthly analysis of 75,000 customer emails and redesigned its online banking and billpay portal as a result. It significantly reduced the number of customer complaints.
Other areas where it could be useful include analyzing blogs or interfacing with databases such as Factiva and Lexus Nexis. “You could define what you wanted to write about and our product would give you a spreadsheet of timely and important concepts,” says Clarkson. “There are a lot of different potential applications.”
The company’s uReka product also allows collaboration among users who can store concepts, links, urls and text so everyone does not have to start a specific search from scratch. uReka is the company’s “Piper Cub,” product, with six functions, vs. uReveal, which has 36.
Clients have included Wachovia, Fireman’s Fund, Marriott, General Electric, Caterpillar, Bank of America, Stein Mrt, the University of Florida and the University of Miami burn unit. It prices the products via processor-based and per-seat-based approaches but has recently begun offering Software as a Service (SaaS).
On the Web: www.Ixreveal.com
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