Lucidworks is a San Francisco, California-based software company that specializes in commerce, customer service, and workplace applications.
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Lucidworks was founded in 2007 under the name Lucid Imagination and launched in 2009. The company was later renamed Lucidworks in 2012.[1]
The Lucidworks founding technical team consisted of Marc Krellenstein, Grant Ingersoll, Erik Hatcher, and Yonik Seeley,[1] in addition to advisor Doug Cutting.[citation needed]
Lucidworks operates primarily with a subscription-based business model. They offer their Lucidworks Fusion platform for designing, building, and deploying big data applications, in addition to subscriptions for support, training, and integration services for open source search software.
On September 18, 2014, Lucidworks released Lucidworks Fusion, a platform for building search and discovery applications that includes search technology Apache Solr and computation framework Apache Spark in its core.[2][3]
On May 10, 2017, Lucidworks announced its acquisition of Twigkit, a software company specializing in user experiences for search and big data applications which was later integrated into the Fusion platform as Fusion App Studio.[4]
In September 2017, Reddit partnered with Lucidworks to build their new search application.[5] Nick Caldwell, the VP of engineering at Reddit, stated at the time that “it had the right combination of technology and the ability to augment his engineering team, while helping search to continually evolve on Reddit.”[6]
On March 6, 2018, Lucidworks released Lucidworks Site Search, an embeddable, configurable, out-of-the-box site search solution running either in the cloud or on-premise.[7]
In September 2014, Lucidworks had “at least two rounds of layoff in the past three months” due to failures in multiple partnerships.[8]
According to a VentureBeat article, Chief Executive Paul Doscher was “replaced with former Splunk business-development director Will Hayes, who had no C-level experience.”[9]
Multiple sources and former employees stated that the company had not increased annual sales[citation needed], and Will Hayes allegedly sought to “move LucidWorks up from its home in Redwood City, California, to San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood.” This was reportedly closer to his home.[10]
The company received Series A funding from Basis Technology, Granite Ventures, and Walden International in September 2008; In-Q-Tel is a strategic investor. In August 2014, Lucidworks closed an $8 million Series C round with Shasta Ventures, Basis Technology, Granite Ventures and Walden International participating.[11][12] In November 2015, Lucidworks closed a $21 million Series D round with Allegis Capital, and existing investors Shasta Ventures and Granite Ventures participating.[13] In May 2018, the firm announced a $50 million Series E led by Top Tier Capital Partners, with participation from Silver Lake’s growth capital fund, Silver Lake Waterman.[14] In August 2019, Lucidworks announced $100M in Series F funding led by Francisco Partners and TPG Sixth Street Partners, with existing investors Top Tier Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures and Allegis participating.[15]
