Eight Years Later, Vivisimo Raises $4 Million For Enterprise Search.

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1. banglo
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 12:50 pm

   I agree with the observation. Good luck to vivismo trying to go up against search giants, especially in the search arena. Now if their technology came with some nice user friendly front end software, they may have a chance.

2. emma
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

   if you know nothing about it then why are you writing about it? (although the Google ads adorning this site give some indication!)

   This company doesn’t need your permission to do anything. Why bother take on Microsoft or Google? Maybe because the pair off them universally suck at most of the things they do and competition and innovation are born from the minds of free thinking entrepreneurs and engineers willing to take on the big guys!

   living proof that the blogosphere is full of chuckleheads!

3. Andrew
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 12:58 pm

   they don’t need to be #1, they can be #4-5 and with good technology wait to be acquired for a nice chunk of money.

   + I’m sure the guy/guys running that company don’t mind making XXX/year doing this compared to working for someone else for a smaller/equal amount

4. Jason
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

   If I recall, Google started around when were no less than 10 “big” search engine companies entrenched in the market. And the top search scientist at Alta Vista turned down Google’s technology for $500,000. And Terry dumbass Semel didn’t respond to several opportunities to buy Google for a billion.

   A long shot indeed, but never rule out a black horse. I know nothing about their technology, but Google has proved that sometimes a black horse can come from nowhere.

5. veliancho
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

   it is funny all the stupid social startups with few screens and avatars, take $10mil,$20mil whereas vivisimo, a real good hitech startup started by computer science phds from Carnegi, takes only $4mil and morever, people question why that much money is needed. Wake up guys.

6. Vijay Chakravarthy
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 1:12 pm

   Enterprise search is a very different animal from regular search, and there are vast opportunities for differentiation. You can essentially pick areas of search that others would not do well (random examples include things like spatial search, semantic search relevant to a specific domain (pharma is a good example)), and out execute the larger players quite effectively.

7. jjjj
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

   The problem is clustering isnt all that attractive to people. People want simplicity. If you really want clustering try looking at carrot2 project which is an opensource setup and works just aswell.

   Think its abit late in the day to get the funding , 8 years down the line ?

   —————
   http://ptisouthwest.sampasite......ngine-bui/
   ———————————————–

8. Yakov
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

   I am sorry but they have been around for too long. What makes a difference now for them to make it to a large player in enterprise search then?

9. JosefVirek
   

   March 17th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

   The technology is good. Some big company’s probably going to buy them.

10. Daniel Larsson
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    Ha ha ha! Seriously creative to call the author a “chucklehead” for pointing out that a niche has fierce competition!

    Go ahead yourself, look for venture capital for your processor manufacturer ‘Untel’ that aims at taking on the industry with $4mil in capital!

    Moron

11. ventureblogalist
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    The capital efficiency model is at the heart of the entrepreneurial system. Surprised to see you guys knock it. I could easily as cite big company syndrome as why they could win.

    Anyways, good to see you guys increasingly cover enterprise IT.

12. The Hater
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm

    Go CMU!

13. Neef
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

    “Enterprise search is a very different animal from regular search, and there are vast opportunities for differentiation.”

    Vijay brings up an excellent point. Enterprise search (Enterprise anything, really) is different from regular search. Take it as axiomatic that Google is the best general-search system in history. General search applied to a typical set of corporate assets will return a massive, undifferentiated mess. You’d have your Sarbanes-Oxley documentation mixed in with your disaster-recovery memos, your systems requirement documents mixed in with your product listings, etc.

    Now cluster that, so that the 85,000 results are grouped by department, then by category, then by…I dunno, department managers. With the Clusty 2.0 upgrade, you can even shuffle those categories to get new breakdowns. Now you have something approaching usable search results, even when applied to heterogenous assets. It’s basically a search hypercube, much like a Data Warehouse. You can slice and dice it.

    This doesn’t mean Clusty’s necessarily going to gain any traction. Their clustering algorithm still has to produce meaningful breakdowns from data in the documents. Latent Semantic Analysis is very hard to do right, especially if your users demand intuitive, business-meaningful clusters.

14. Gavin Schulz
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    Wow, what was the author thinking. I agree with the Google thing. Very few companies ever become a huge industry player, most just get bought out. There is always room for more. This post was made strictly to post something today, and get more eyes to see their ads. If Monday is slow, then post something proper, not something to just rip apart this company. Also if you have never seen their technology, or any other enterprise technology, then why are you giving you’re useless opinion. Comment on things that you have had experience with, not stuff you don;t know anything about. Applying your thinking, no one should start another blog, cause TC already exists right?

15. Erick Schonfeld
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    There is nothing wrong with capital efficiency, but when Endeca has raised 10X as much and FAST was bought for more than $1 billion, it makes it look like Vivisimo is the unwanted child of enterprise search.

    There is nothing wrong with Vivisimo’s clustering technology per se. But this is not some new, breakthrough technology. Its had plenty of chance to establish itself.

    It is hard to evaluate an enterprise search engine unless you work at a company that has installed it inside the firewall. But how many of you use Clusty (which is based on the same technology)? That’s what I thought.

16. Michael Hickins
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    Hi Eric,
    Before seeing your response, I was going to comment on the fact that I think Clusty is a differentiating technology. I use Clusty on a fairly regular basis, especially when my search terms are simple and the Google results are too plentiful to be useful.

17. R.J.
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 3:06 pm

    Clustering technology for web search is really hard. I know, I played deep in this space for 7 years myself, and even evaluated using Vivisimo’s core clustering engine for my company Grokker.com, back when we both were just getting started. The problem is the clusters aren’t perceptibly perfect, and they need to be, in order to achieve mass adoption. I remember Steve Jobs saying the same thing about voice recognition. It won’t ever become mass market until it is perfected to the point where users perceive it as real human intelligence on the other end.

    Even after all these years, clustering has not seen huge leaps in quality needed to make it a sustainable standalone business or achieve true consumer appeal and value. This has resulted in steady declines in clustering-based businesses across the board. In order to survive companies like Vivisimo and Grokker have to put the pedal to the innovative medal, and fast. Grokker’s core value proposition was always about infoviz, and it certainly seems that infoviz finally starting to gain some grassroots adoption, albeit slowwwwly.

    Enterprise search is one thing– always room there to disrupt and displace the old school companies like Verity, Autonomy, and Fast, that shouldn’t be to difficult. But a company based almost exclusively on the clustering technology for the key competitive advantage presents rather thin ice on which to skate in today’s market.

18. Neef
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    I can think of circumstances where you’d choose to raise 4 million instead of 55. If you’re already profitable, and your software is out of beta, and your product is designed to run on your client’s hardware (instead of you hosting it)…I’m not sure what you’d DO with 55 million. Triple your current dev staff? Buy rosewood desks for the secretaries?

    I’m wondering if this isn’t money for a big marketing push, perhaps they have hit some internal milestone and they’re thinking “Finally! Ok go sell it!”.

    Either way, it’s an interesting story.

19. Journalism 2.0?
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    Dude, if you’re going to opine about something, at least try it first…
    Otherwise, it’s kinda like reviewing a book without even reading the Cliff Notes…

    At least you have that disclaimer at the end, but it’s better to avoid being required to use disclaimers in the first place. The subject, and the writing, would be better served with some research instead.

    I haven’t tried it, but then again, I’m not getting paid to write about it either.

20. TheReSearcher
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    Vivisimo is a great addon to search engines (with their clustering technology), but can vivisimo (with velocity 6.) really fight against all those other (enterprise) search engines? good point.

    The article is - in my opnion - not written so badly, but you should not judge over something you don’t know/understand, i.e. “Enterprise Markets”.

    Why Vivisimo is asking so “late” for 4 mill, is still questionable, even so i wish them luck. Great guys, keep going, maybe MS is willing to pay some 100 mill. in near future again

21. emma
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 6:07 pm

    “It is hard to evaluate an enterprise search engine unless you work at a company that has installed it inside the firewall. But how many of you use Clusty (which is based on the same technology)? That’s what I thought.”

    awww poor you, might have to do some work and find out facts before writing, shame.

    Gutless hack!

22. Rob Mowery
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

    Looking over their website there is much information there in terms of where they started (3 researchers from CMU), where they have been(looks like they have done both commercial and gov’t sectors), and where they are going (check their careers/hiring). Again looking at the press on them (http://www.redherring.com/blogs/23887) it looks like from just $1 million grant they now have a 100 person company and seems operations are profitable. So….

    @18 - your point looks right on. If they can repeat/expand on just $4 million, then why a need for more money to burn. It will be interesting to see the ROI on that, since there is no mention I could find the ROI on $1 million. But to run a business for 8 years with 100 people - one could estimate their annual revenues - to at least cover payroll.

    In terms of their technology, Clusty looks like one example and then USASearch.gov is another. (see their customer list). Many good points on the competition in the market - but has anyone solved all the problems yet?
    I am not an expert in search - so I can’t really comment on how they compete with others, but for a solid business investment I would put money into them, even with moderate ROI - seems to be worth the risk.

    It will be interesting to watch them and see if anyone sets their sights on them for acquisition.

23. John Quincy
    

    March 17th, 2008 at 7:28 pm

    Worst article ever. This is lame.
    Why even bother writing about this?
    Erik, come on. Where you just hungover for St. Patties day.
    I mean we’ve all been there, but just admit it before you write worthless crap.

24. Chris
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 5:59 am

    My company currently uses Google for enterprise search but we have been beta testing with Vivisimo. I have done some pretty extensive testing purely Google vs. Vivisimo but others have compared it (from what I can tell) to more enterprise search options than I believed available. All this said and done, we are now in the process of changing to Vivisimo. For a company of over 100k employees, this is a big change. But why the change from Google?

    Google is a *great* internet search engine. As an enterprise search engine, it leaves a lot to be desired. All of its great technology is counter-productive in an enterprise environment. As some can tell, part of Google’s algorithm includes how often a result is linked to by other sites in an index. This has brought nothing but less-than desirable results. With Vivisimo, I have found the search process to be much more rewarding. The cluster technology, while nothing new, is a GREAT asset in an enterprise environment with over 1.4 million documents spread out over the servers. Because the clustering is created dynamically rather than being based on tags or keywords, you can use this feature from the start.

    I think any company that is seriously looking to improve its internal search will consider this option (and others like it) over the internet search leaders. From the outside they seem the same but as its been said previously, the environments are completely different.

    Glad to see they are now in a position to expand even further.

25. S@m!
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 6:20 am

    I met one of the founders a couple of years back and believe me, they have setup a nice little business for themselves. I agree with the emphasis on “little”, but then again… nothing wrong with that as long as the founders, employees and customers are happy (although I’m not so sure about what could be the investors’ expectations on this round since, so far, Enterprise Search has not being necessarily a skyrocketing-growth market).

    Also, it is important to point out that Vivissimo is not a “consumer web” oriented business and Clusty is hardly their cash cow. They are much more into selling enterprise search solutions (where clustering might make a lot more sense) and related services, which gives them a steady revenue stream (I would guess the founders are quite comfortable by not relying solely on advertising or, even worse, by not having a business model at all as usually is the case with half of the startups covered here).

    Couple of interesting points about them:
    1) They do something that Google is not really interested in doing (at least not until now), since Vivissimo can custom build enterprise search solutions linking together different, and sometimes legacy (an obvious hit with potential clients in the government sector), databases into one single destination point on an Intranet or on the web (a.k.a. “federated search”).

    2) They are a much quicker (to implement) and cheaper option than Fast/MS.

    Anyway, kudos for them since persistence has paid off in this case. Having said that, it’s quite obvious why people that hang around TC would not appreciate stories about “boring” enterprise oriented business like this one… Maybe it’s not “fancy” enough to deserver a headline around here. Go figure.

26. Steve Kohler
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 7:07 am

    Well, boys I think that the big old boys have a wide open gap
    in their technologies, that someone, without much money can
    drive a truck through. Remember, before the internet, Mosiac/Netscape,
    there was AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy.

    The semantic web is real as is Enterprise search, and both offer
    big opps for someone/anyone with some apps.

    Remember YouTube, Facebook, etc. These are essential no brainers
    from a technology standpoint. So was Google. So was Yahoo.

    Time to re-think.

27. Steve Kohler
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 7:13 am

    One last point….the timing is now-ish on Enterprise Search, with most
    buyers of the previous products left unsatisfied (see recent Forrester Report).

    The corporate buyer is just now understanding the need for this capability,
    and the mathematical modelling is just getting good enough in the last couple
    of years to really make some breakthroughs.

28. Mike Clintock
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 8:28 am

    Vivisimo / clusty is an eight year old company. Assuming they have enterprise customers (haven’t read many new announcements lately) they are part of the group that created the dissatisfaction, not a start-up with new technology. Erik is right, why even bother? Maybe they need the money to keep the lights on?

29. AOsman
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 11:23 am

    I have been following and using Vivísimo for a very long time. I thought they had by far the best user interface for search. I love the way they categorize search results. To this day, I’m surprised the leading search giants haven’t incorporated this into their products

30. Puneet Gupta
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 2:23 pm

    They are also making an enterance into the ’social search’ Enterprise 2.0 area.
    Social Bookmarking and Tagging is something that they have recently added to their product line.

31. David H
    

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    Actually, our company, Interwoven, reviewed quite a few vendors in the Enterprise Search market before selecting Vivisimo to partner with on our Interwoven Universal Search product.

    We selected them because it was easy to use, highly configurable, high performance and offered intuitive features that set it apart from keyword search vendors. Most other vendors proved to be very difficult to set up and required extensive programming to customize for our users. Conversely, Vivisimo offered features that worked right out of the box like clustering and binning with very little configuration needed. They also are very forward looking with their new social search features which promise to increase the relevancy of enterprise search results.

    Another important consideration was that their engineering and customer support was very responsive and most of their crawlers are developed in-house so that we don’t have to rely on our partner’s partners in order to resolve potential problems at customer sites. Many of the bigger vendors like Google and Microsoft rely on a diverse partner channel to provide value added functionality to their platform, including most of their content crawlers, which just added another layer of complexity and finger-pointing that we didn’t need to deal with.

    I think that many of the bigger vendors rely too much on their brand name recognition and focus on providing a basic search platform that customers and partners can build upon for specific market functionality. Of course, building out someone else’s technology adds a great deal of development, deployment and support costs and that is not what we want to provide to our customers.

    The great thing about Vivisimo for us as a customer is that they are focused almost exclusively on Enterprise Search and are not distracted by other things like Internet advertising. That focus is why Vivisimo has built a better mousetrap and will continue to do so. I think that it is great to see the extra investment that will help Vivisimo jump to the next level in their business development.

32. Dan Martell
    

    March 19th, 2008 at 3:54 am

    I’ve played with many Enterprise Search technologies (Verity, Google, Microsoft, etc.) and I’ve got to say I LOVE VIVISIMO. I was working with it at a Fortune 50 customer, just last week, and it blew my mind.

    Within an Enterprise, the clustering technology really starts to shine - so if you haven’t see a demo, go sign up - you won’t be disappointed.

33. Bill Gates
    

    March 19th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    If size and timing of investments are any indication…. Microsoft received investment only once (a few millions in 1981 - 6 years after being founded) while Pets.com received > $100M (80 through IPO) in its first year and a half…

34. Joe Schueller
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 9:10 am

    I’m in an enterprise using Vivisimo, and their approach to search is far more progressive than many others. They truly understand that the search index is simply an application database upon which you can build some phenomenally interesting capability - like the social work that Puneet pointed out. The search engine becomes a powerful mashup tool - an XML-based data feed of all the content in your enterprise that includes pre-bound security.

    I agree in the consumer space this goes into the “Why-Even-Bother Department,” but I think it is a bit presumptuous to declare Vivisimo in that category for the enterprise.