Thursday, June 5, 2008

Metatomix triples staff, gets funds

By Efrain Viscarolosaga

With a new round of funding, a recently signed reseller agreement with IBM Corp. and a new original-equipment manufacturing partnership, Dedham-based semantic technology developer Metatomix Inc. is looking at a banner year.

The 60-person Metatomix, which last year employed 22, has spent the past 12 months gradually building its distribution strategy, first with direct sales, then through industry channels and finally into OEM deals such as a new one with financial services technology vendor ACI Worldwide Inc. Now, with a $2.1 million infusion of cash from existing investors, officials expect big things over the next year.

“We expect to triple our revenue this year, and we continue to hire,” said Jeff Dickerson, president and CEO of Metatomix. While Dickerson would not reveal specific revenue numbers, he said 2008’s sales could fall in the $10 million to $20 million range.

The new equity funding, reported in federal filings last month, represents a fraction of what executives originally predicted they would need and will help bolster Metatomix’s engineering and sales teams. Investors include Apex Venture Partners and Dunrath Capital of Chicago, Battelle Ventures of New Jersey and North Hill Ventures of Boston. The company has raised $47 million since its inception in 2000.

It’s all semantics

Metatomix is riding a wave of interest in semantic technology. The company’s middleware lets enterprises — from state and county governments to pharmaceutical developers and financial institutions — take information from different sources, such as databases, web applications, intranets and internal networks, and aggregate it into a complete “view.”

The company’s first deployments were with state and county law enforcement agencies that needed to bring disparate data on criminals together into a single profile. But the technology has been catching on in financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceutical development and others. Through the ACI Worldwide partnership, for example, Metatomix has sold 14 systems aimed at spotting money-laundering trends, according to Dickerson.

In a 2007 report highlighting the biggest trends in information technology in 2008, analysts at Gartner Inc. put metadata management and semantic computing among the top ten trends in the industry.

While IBM is reselling Metatomix’s product, three former employees of Big Blue launched their own venture earlier this year. Cambridge Semantics Inc. is in the early stages of developing what its website calls a “semantic application server for service-oriented architecture.”