Lucidworks builds an AI-based search engine, Fusion, that personalizes results for enterprise and customer-facing use cases by applying machine learning and other AI techniques. The product pulls in multiple data sources and signals (past behavior, location, cohort behavior) to tailor results for scenarios such as e-commerce and knowledge-worker information retrieval. Around half of its business comes from digital commerce and digital content use cases and the other half from internal knowledge-worker applications. The company counts roughly 400 customers, including Reddit, Red Hat, REI and the U.S. Census. Lucidworks says it has been doubling revenues each year for the last three years and has raised about $200 million to date. It plans to invest the new funding to add more natural language processing and semantic search features and to support its next stage of growth, with an eventual public listing being a possibility discussed by management. Founded in California in 2007, Lucidworks provides a platform that enables companies to design and deploy intelligent search-based applications without building systems from scratch. The product surfaces relevant results from signals of user intent and supports features such as product recommendations, spell-check, auto-suggestions, device‑tailored results, and synonym management. Lucidworks targets sectors from financial services to e-commerce and cites customers including Reddit, Uber, Staples, Qualcomm, Dell, AT&T, Red Hat, and the Financial Times. The company says its platform helps customers better compete with large search providers like Amazon and Google by delivering “smart data experiences.” Lucidworks plans to use the new capital to expand its enterprise product and help leading companies bring smarter search and data experiences to market. CEO Will Hayes framed the company’s mission as solving the “last mile problem in AI,” making complex data science accessible to end users. Lucidworks provides the Fusion platform, built on Apache Solr, to help companies translate massive amounts of data into actionable business intelligence and intelligent search. The platform targets sectors including consumer retail, healthcare, insurance and financial services and is designed to operate at any scale. Lucidworks lists customers such as Red Hat, Verizon, Sears, ADP, Staples, Cisco, MapR and Hortonworks. The company is led by CEO Will Hayes. It raised $21M in venture capital and intends to use the funds to continue building the platform and accelerate growth. The business is based in San Francisco, CA. LucidWorks sells search software and commercial distributions built on Apache Lucene/Solr, plus training, commercial support, and tools that sit on top of the open-source technology. The company was founded in 2007 and launched in 2009, with early strategic backing from In-Q-Tel and later investments from firms such as Granite Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Walden International. Leadership and operational turbulence have followed recent investor intervention that replaced CEO Paul Doscher with Will Hayes; LucidWorks has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs while also hiring (the chief marketing officer said nine people were let go and 20 hired since June). Sales have struggled: the company set a revenue target of $12 million for the year (in line with last year) and has lost at least one Fortune 500 customer to a rival, while other customers have migrated to Elasticsearch. Product delivery has reportedly missed customer shipping deadlines, and LucidWorks is facing two lawsuits involving a former SVP of engineering and a founder. The company is considering a move from Redwood City to San Francisco’s Union Square and has won some new government contracts, including with the FDA and the National Labor Relations Board. LucidWorks offers two core platforms: LucidWorks Search, built on Apache Lucene/Solr to simplify embedded search applications, and LucidWorks Big Data to help organizations analyze multistructured data. The company began as Lucid Imagination in 2008 to provide support, training, and consulting for Lucene and Solr before pivoting to product development. LucidWorks Search launched in 2011 and LucidWorks Big Data in 2012. The team includes roughly one-fourth of those who originally committed to the Apache Lucene/Solr project, and the company positions itself as the largest supporter of open-source search in the industry. Customers named in the article include AT&T, Nike, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, The Motley Fool, Cisco, Macy’s, Netflix and Zappos. Financially, the company has raised capital across multiple rounds and recently added new funding to its balance sheet, bringing total capital raised to $26 million.

Total raised

$209M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Aug 2019