KSolutions Inc. of Annapolis recently received $50 million in venture funding in its first financing two months after the company was founded.

"This helps us take the management team out of fund-raising," said Matt Vettel, a partner at Great Hill Partners, which put up the money. Boston-based Great Hill, manager of $1 billion of investment capital, typically funds early-stage companies that it helped create with $20 million to $50 million.

KSolutions is the result of nearly three years of conversations between Great Hill and members of a KSolutions management team, nearly all of them former members of KPMG Consulting, as they sought a business with huge growth potential and the need for unique expertise. The "knowledge management" industry was the opportunity they found.

"If you look over the last 10 years at where corporations have invested billions of dollars, it is to automate systems that do business processes," Vettel said. As a result, he said, "corporate information technology is a patchwork of databases." KSolutions aims to help corporations extract useful information from that patchwork of databases.

"How do I organize all of this data in my corporation?" is how chief executive Stephen M. Cranford expresses the problem KSolutions hopes to address. "And how do I make sense of that data in a way that is going to be relevant towards driving my bottom line?"

Cranford's experience comes from working with banks in the mid-1990s that often had different databases for lending, savings and other operations. Cranford helped them manage their databases by first developing software to link the different information sources, and then by assisting the banks in interpreting the results.

Along those lines, KSolutions provides two distinct information services to its clients. Software engineers first develop means of linking different corporate databases and extracting the data into usable form. KSolutions also provides consultant services to help companies use their newfound information in an effort to improve their business.

Cranford comes from KPMG Consulting, an Internet consulting unit of KPMG International, where he was senior vice president of knowledge management solutions. He thought he could better serve companies in a setting that offered "the skills and capabilities of a Big Five firm, but was more focused," he said. Two months ago, after leaving KPMG, he founded KSolutions with Great Hill. The company began operations Sept. 11 with two employees--"me and a recruiter," Cranford said.

Since then, the company has grown to 52 employees, and Cranford expects that number to jump to 300 by early next year on the way to 650 by the end of 2001. A majority of the initial funding will be used for a further rollout of services as well as to finance the rapid buildup of employees.

Those employees will be split between an office in Annapolis and a technical center in Dallas, where the engineers who develop the systems for linking databases are located.

KSolutions is working with three clients that Cranford would identify only as "in the Fortune 200." He also said relationships with 20 to 30 other corporations are "in the pipeline."

More stories in VENTURE CAPITAL online at Washtech.com. KSolutions

Deal Size: $50 Million

Investor: Great Hill Partners

Description: Software and consulting services to help companies interpret and use information stored in different databases

Headquarters: Annapolis

Employees: 52

Web site: www.ksolutionsinc.com