Semantra, a provider of semantic search technology for businesses, landed a $3.8 million second round from return investor Cardinal Investment Company, Semantra announced Thursday.
Dallas, Texas-based Cardinal, a private investment firm, previously invested $2.3 million in Semantra, in September 2006.
Addison, Texas-based Semantra’s software is designed to let corporate clients use common language to search for a wide variety of business information in corporate databases. Semantra, which has 25 employees, uses natural language processing to find data throughout a company's databases. This is useful because data is often labeled with general terms like “meeting” or “strategy,” or with esoteric, industry-specific language.
Rather than relying on the typical method of Internet searches based on keywords, Semantra takes advantage of semantic technology, which can “understand” the meaning of language. This lets companies understand the meaning of queries and find appropriate information.
The company has developed customized language sets for companies in specific industries such as financial services, health care, and customer relationship management.
Within the enterprise search space, Semantra focuses on extracting information from a wide variety of corporate databases—running software from companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, or Sybase—as opposed to other companies, which help organize so-called unstructured data such as documents.
Most of the people in corporations don’t use enterprise software and need weeks of training to get up to speed with it, according to Chris Davis, Semantra CEO.
However, using Semantra’s software, sales or marketing people in a company can quickly grab very specific sales data about geographic regions using different variables, Mr. Davis said.
“This obviates the need for an individual marketing analyst to go to Joe in IT to get a report,” Mr. Davis said.
The company will use the cash infusion to build out its products and develop relationships which enterprise software giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, with which it seeks to work on integrating its products.
The semantic search space is crowded with startups claiming to do search better than Google. On the consumer side, Hakia, Powerset, and Radar Networks have, or are about to roll out, their products, while on the enterprise side, companies like Fourth Codex, TopQuadrant, and Metatomix have been moving aggressively to sell to corporate clients.
Enterprise search has garnered more interest because of the success of companies like Google in the consumer search space, Mr. Davis said.
“Everybody benefits in enterprise search because of what Google is doing. [People are] asking for more out of enterprise search,” Mr. Davis said, because they can so easily find things on the public Internet.