Wither Nervana?
April 16, 2010
I received a call about a company in the Seattle area. The firm is Nervana, founded in 2001, and if you are one of the lucky folks attending the Gilbane conference in San Francisco, you can hear a talk by Nervana’s founder, Nosa Omoigui. Nervana focused on semantics and natural language processing. My Overflight files has a meaty collection of information about this company’s technology. The firm received funding and ramped up its marketing in 2006. The firm pushed into the processing of health and medical content. Then the firm refocused its efforts on the processing of résumés. The firm’s Web site is online at www.nervana.com, but the news section has not been updated since November 2006. I continue to track the firm because Mr. Omoigui is involved with Youth for Technology Foundation which has a presence in Louisville, Kentucky.
What’s important about Nervana is that the company’s trajectory shows how a very bright entrepreneur in the field of content processing has positioned what is, in my opinion, a quite interesting technical system. The firm’s technology is anchored in “a unique technology that allows knowledge workers to ask questions naturally within the context of their meanings.” A LinkedIn description adds:
“Nervana, Inc. provides knowledge discovery solutions for companies. Its solutions enable knowledge based workers to find, correlate, and retrieve the information from repositories both inside and outside their enterprise. The company’s products include Drug Discovery that provides Medline, life sciences news, and life sciences Web content for research and development teams; Business Discovery, which offers Medline, life sciences news, general news, patents, and life sciences Web; IP Discovery that enables users to discover and retrieve information from the United States, European, Japanese, and other worldwide patents; and Premium Discovery for enterprise customers to manage their in-house information. It also offers project management, logistics, pre-configuration, onsite installation, informatics consulting, and documentation services. Nervana was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.”
My notes show that one of the sources of funding is now involved in a company that seems to use the original Nervana logo. This firm is Dipiti. SeattlePI in February 2008 ran a story “Dipiti, a Search Engine for Message Boards.” Dipiti seems to have gone off line and now redirects to Hot Shopper.
What’s interesting is that the trajectory of Nervana shows that next generation content processing has huge potential. Management and investors tried a number of different markets. The other thought that struck me is the words and phrases used to describe the firm’s technology are as fresh today as they were in the firm’s marketing push in 2006. Next generation content processing evokes considerable market interest. Nervana, shortly before it repositioned, was named a “Hot 100” company and touted some major clients, including Procter & Gamble. (Lists of “hot” companies may not be valid indicators of a firm’s health in my opinion.)
This is an interesting case example of the challenges facing some types of technologies.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2010
A freebie.
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