San Francisco-based Lucidworks has locked down its sixth funding round, securing $100 million for its AI- and machine learning-powered search tools.
The company’s latest cash infusion, which brings its total funding to $209 million according to Crunchbase, comes from equity fund Francisco Partners and investment firm TPG Sixth Street Partners. The company held its Series A in January 2019 and last received funding in May 2018. Lucidworks hopes to set itself apart from the growing pack of smart search companies by leveraging machine learning that predicts a user’s query in order to surface strong, personalized result matches.
Lucidworks customer AllMedx recently shared its success using the platform in its quest to create a “Google for doctors.” Using Fusion, AllMedx crawls a number of medical resources, including PubMed, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health DailyMed, and news sites heavily trafficked by physicians. The goal is to create a search destination that provides meaningful information to health professionals without consumer-facing detritus that isn’t of use when treating patients.
Using a combination of Apache Solr search engine and Apache Spark for All AI, Lucidworks claims that it can process thousands of requests per second from thousands of simultaneous users. Implementation of machine learning means that over time, AllMedx and other Fusion-powered search engines will improve. For instance, neurologists searching for “anticoagulation after stroke” will first see results that others in the field found useful.
Lucidworks’ Fusion also powers a number of consumer-focused search features across a number of industries. Notable clients include Aetna, Uber, AT&T, Staples, and “the internet’s front page,” Reddit.
Reddit vice president of engineering Nick Caldwell credits Fusion with drastically improving the website’s availability and result fidelity. He specifically identifies a higher level of relevance calculation control offered by Fusion in combination with a “dramatic” cost reduction as key factors in Reddit’s satisfaction with the platform.
Like Reddit, AllMedx found value in Fusion’s enhanced control. The company leveraged it to condense the entire medical field into a taxonomy spanning 12,000 different disease states and then applied the rubric to a body of work encompassing 7 million documents. AllMedx plans to grow its service using Lucidworks’ technology to create specific bodies of content that serve a variety of medical subspecialties.
Lucidworks is currently undergoing a leadership shift, as co-founder and chief technology officer Grant Ingersoll recently announced he is leaving his full-time position with the company. In a farewell post, he says he’ll be staying on as a “shareholder and cheerleader.” His replacement has not yet been announced.
