Text-analysis startup Synapsify slurps up $850K

Synapsify, a startup that claims it can rank the most important statements in a sea of text, has brought in $850,000 in new funding.

In addition to announcing the funding today, Synapsify also launched a new web-based “virtual analyst” that recommends the specific text that’s worth paying the most attention to. People can upload a spreadsheet, and the service can analyze the data, and the service can filter sentences, tweets, or or text, prioritize them, and generate reports on all the text.

From there, things really get interesting, as the system can suggest what to focus on when people upload similar data sets in the future, Synapsify cofounder and chief executive Stephen Candelmo said in an interview with VentureBeat.

The technology, he said, can be useful for time-short marketing people that lack the technical know-how for integrating, say, Synapsify’s existing application programming interface (API). And it can be more informative than some existing text-analysis tools, too.

“Positive, negative, or neutral [sentiment] only gets them so far and it doesn’t answer the question ‘Why?'” Candelmo said.

The funding and product news comes as investors become more interested in doing smarter things with text. Lexalytics just bought Semantria, which was one of Synapsify’s most visible comeptitors. Clarabridge, Idibon, Luminoso, and others have also gotten funding.

To date Bethesda, Md.-based Synapsify has raised $1.5 million after its 2012 founding.

Investors in this round include Standup Capital and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

The startup has five customers, including Emoderation and Liveworld, and nine full-time employees.

It focuses on English-language text processing, but it’s interested in applying its smarts to other languages in the future, Candelmo said.