"The way people search for information is starting to break down," says RiverGlass CEO Kirk Dauksavage.
Photo: Aynsley Floyd
Searching for Profit
By: Emily Stone September 08, 2008
Run a Google search on "elf." Top results include information on the Will Ferrell movie, sprightly forest creatures and a group studying the language invented by J. R. R. Tolkien in his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
So if you're a law enforcement officer trying to keep tabs on the Earth Liberation Front eco-terrorism group, you have a lot of irrelevant information to wade through.
"The way people search for information is starting to break down," says Kirk Dauksavage, CEO of RiverGlass Inc., a startup spun out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The five-year-old West Chicago company designs computer software that runs simultaneous, focused searches of Web sites and internal data and then helps organize and analyze results. Say a police officer runs a search on ELF: The officer can tell the software to look only for the organization and deliver relevant information from Web sites, blogs and internal documents like arrest records and intelligence reports, sorting the results into useful categories and perhaps clustering references to an upcoming protest or new group leader.
Larry Carr is chief operating officer at Telemus Solutions Inc. in Falls Church, Va., which does research work for federal intelligence agencies and has been using RiverGlass' software. He won't discuss what searches his company runs, but says they usually concern topics on the front page of the newspaper. The software has significantly reduced the amount of time staff members spend gathering information, he says.
"Instead of our analysts sitting and spending hours and hours and hours searching, we let the tool run and get all that information collected," Mr. Carr says.
RiverGlass' technology grew out of U of I's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Michael Welge, director of NCSA's automated learning group, helped develop data-mining tools in the 1990s — a time when companies were saving lots of data and beginning to realize there was something to be learned from it. Among then were Fortune 100 companies, which Mr. Welge won't name, that hired NCSA to look for patterns in their records indicating common employee errors, for example, or to look for trends in warranty claims indicating fraud.
Mr. Welge dreamed of starting a business but says he was stymied by the group's lack of business know-how. By 2003, though, U of I had expanded its tech transfer office and helped create Illinois Ventures LLC, a Chicago investment group, and the business was launched.
Illinois Ventures liked that companies already had sought out the NCSA technology and knew there would be a market for data-mining software as the volume of information online multiplied, says Illinois Ventures Senior Director Rob Schultz. The Chicago firm invested $250,000 initially. Mr. Schultz took the helm of the company for a year before hiring Mr. Dauksavage, a veteran of two tech startups.
Mr. Dauksavage won't say what U of I's stake is in the company but says the university got stock in RiverGlass in exchange for rights to the intellectual property developed there. Mr. Welge serves on the company's board.
RiverGlass has raised $8 million, with Illinois Ventures, Country Financial in Bloomington and RPM Ventures in Ann Arbor, Mich., as its main investors. The company is working with the Illinois State Police and the U.S. Department of Defense and has signed a contract this year with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
Mr. Dauksavage won't discuss revenue except to say these are "seven-figure deals." He says RiverGlass has a shot at becoming profitable this year.
©2008 by Crain Communications Inc.
