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Name: Clarabridge
Location: Falls Church
Funding: The company received $3 million in Series A funding from Boulder Ventures Ltd. in January.
Big idea: Clarabridge makes software that analyzes large quantities of unstructured data contained in a variety of documents such as memos, notes from clinical trials, financial reports, medical records, grants, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and claim forms. Sid Banerjee, co-founder and chairman, said the software can find trends in data, giving a company greater insight into complex business issues. "The software analyzes the sentences and paragraphs in a document, extracts data and parses out the meaning in order to capture a quantitative trend," Banerjee said. "It asks: What's happening? Who's doing what to whom? Which transactions are being described?" The software can be applied to any type of document containing unstructured data, said Justin Langseth, co-founder, president and chief technology officer, and can examine "anything from a couple of words to a thousand pages." The company is currently focusing on applications in customer relationship management, the government and medicine.
How the idea was hatched: The software grew out of the co-founders' previous company, Claraview. "We saw there was this incredible chasm between how people analyzed data in a database and [how they analyzed] unstructured data," Banerjee said. "They had all these rigorous analytical techniques and there was so little ability to do the same kind of thing on unstructured text."
Example of use: The software could be used to mine customer interactions captured in a call center, Banerjee said. The notes a customer service representative takes about a call could be examined in addition to routine data points such as a customer's name, account number and the duration of the call. That would give a company more information about complex issues such as which products have the most problems, which cause the most costly repairs or which cause customers to cancel service. "A lot of times the stories around why something broke are not captured in structured data," Langseth said. "The explanation and questions about what happened are anecdotal, unstructured."
Big-name customers: Lowe's Home Improvement was the only customer that company executives said they could reveal. They said the software also is being used by a large international manufacturer in a call center, a marketing agency and government regulatory and intelligence organizations.
Price: Mid-point pricing is in the $100,000 to $250,000 range, Banerjee said.
Founded: Clarabridge spun off from Claraview in November 2005.
Who's in charge: Banerjee, Langseth, Robert Latchford, chief financial officer; Gene Sohn, vice president of engineering; and Tony Lopresti, vice president of products and marketing.
Employees: 30
Web site: http:/
Partners: Claraview, Business Objects, Attensity Corp., Inxight Software Inc., QL2 Software Inc., MicroStrategy Inc. and Cognos Corp.
What the name means: The name was also spun off from the co-founders' previous company Claraview, Langseth said. "Claraview was a consulting company," Banerjee said. "We wanted to give customers a 'clearer view' of their business. And at Clarabridge, we're bridging the worlds of unstructured and structured data."
-- Andrea Caumont
