LucidWorks pulls in $10M to turn open source data into ‘business gold’

‘Big data’ startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies “turn multistructured data into business gold.”

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LucidWorks product suite contains two development platforms that enable organizations to search, discover, and analyze their data. LucidWorks Search is built on top of Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search project and seeks to simplify and improve the process of building embedded search applications. The other product, LucidWorks Big Data, then helps businesses make sense of the data.

The company employes one-fourth of those who originally committed to the Apache Lucene/Solr project. It started as Lucid Imagination in 2008 to provide support, training, and consulting services for open-source search technologies Lucene and Solr. However, it saw greater opportunities to make open-source search more accessible and “unlock data’s ability to power competitive advantage” and set down to build LucidWorks Search and Big Data, which released in 2011 and 2012, respectively.  AT&T, Nike, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, The Motley Fool, Cisco, Macy’s, Netflix and Zappos are customers. 

LucidWorks claims to be the largest supporter of open-source search in the industry. Organizations are struggling to draw business insights from mountains of unstructured (texts, emails, and so on) and structured data and a crop of well-funded big data startups are trying to provide the simplest way to crawl through petabytes of information, store a massive volume of data, and extract the most relevant information. Endeca, Autonomy, ElasticSearch and recently launched SRCH2 are other players in the space.

According to a form filed with the SEC, existing investors Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, and Walden International contributed to this third round of funding. It brings LucidWorks’ total capital raised to $26 million. LucidWorks is based in Redwood City and has not yet responded to request for comment.