Monday, March 2, 2009

Digital Reef surfaces out of stealth mode

By Galen Moore

Massachusetts software startup Digital Reef Inc. is launching out of stealth mode in hopes it can keep large enterprises off rocky shoals by digging deep into their unstructured business data.

Its core product is software designed to provide electronic discovery, data security and storage. The Boxborough-based startup, formerly known as Auraria Networks Inc., is backed by Matrix Partners and Pilot House Ventures.

Launched quietly in 2006 on $10 million in funding from Matrix, Digital Reef aims to address the digital slide presentations, portable document files and word-processing documents it says make up 85 percent of a typical company’s enterprise data.

“There are far more PowerPoint presentations and Word documents out there than there are data in databases,” said Brian Giuffrida, vice president of marketing and business development, referring to documents made on Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) digital slide and word-processing applications. “It’s essentially a nine-to-one ratio.”

The company’s technology is founded on a “similarity engine” developed by founder Steve Akers. The Linux-based software consists of mathematical models designed to map each document in terms of a math expression. By providing example documents, the engine can find files by context, in addition to keywords and metadata, Giuffrida said.

Akers is the former CTO and founder of Spring Tide Networks Inc., a Maynard-based telecom that was acquired by Lucent Technologies Inc. in July of 2000 for $1.3 billion.

Digital Reef’s e-discovery software is built on a grid computing platform in three tiers: an access tier; a service tier that divides and distributes tasks; and an analytics tier, Giuffrida said. The software is also designed to automate the classification and storage of documents.

Pilot House Ventures joined Digital Reef’s backers as the leader of the company’s second venture capital round — a $10 million financing last October, which brought the company’s total venture investment to $20 million. The company had the first version of its product in beta testing with eight customers starting last spring, Giuffrida said, and launched version two late last year.