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August 12, 2019

Investors Seek Out Lucidworks

Lucidworks, the high-flying search engine platform developer, announced a $100 million funding round. The haul will be poured into its AI-based recommendation tools, including its flagship Fusion search platform.

San Francisco-based Lucidworks said Monday (Aug. 12) the funding round was led by Francisco Partners, a technology-focused equity fund, along with TPG Sixth Street Partners. They join existing investors Allegis Cyber, Granite Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Top Tier Capital Partners.

Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes said Fusion product revenue as doubled year-on-year as the startup’s valuation has quadrupled. The search engine specialist has so far raised about $209 million in five rounds, according to the website Crunchbase.com.

Lucidworks is among a growing number of intelligent search startups offering platforms for unifying data spread across internal and external databases. The company’s AI-based Fusion platform applies machine learning as data is being ingested along with natural language processing and “topic detection.” Based on queries, Fusion AI is designed to predict a user’s intent to deliver the most relevant results.

For enterprise customers, the goal is to deliver Google-like results drawn from company-wide data resources.

Fusion Server combines the Apache Solr search engine with Apache Spark for AI. The server indexes and stores data for use in real-time queries. Lucidworks claims its platform can process thousands of queries per second from thousands of concurrent users.

Lucidworks is a commercial distributor of the Apache Lucene/Solr search engine. Along with Apache Spark, Fusion Server also integrates additional capabilities such as graph analytics and SQL/NoSQL. Those capabilities are combined with Fusion AI to automate the delivery of personalized recommendations and make other predictions.

“Search is the best way to unlock value from the world’s data,” Hayes said in announcing the venture funding. “With the investment, we can continue to advance the enterprise standard for personalization and AI.”

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