Open Source Search Player Lucid Imagination Locks Up Another $10 Million In Funding

Lucid Imagination, the Massachussetts-based startup focused on support and services for open source search technologies Apache Lucene and Solr, has announced that it has secured $10 million of Series B financing.  After launching last year,  the company was among a small handful of open source companies to obtain really significant venture capital funding.  The company collected $6 million from a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by Granite Ventures and Walden International, and has also obtained funding from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA.

Lucid Imagination's most recent round of funding includes a new investment from Shasta Ventures, and extended participation from existing investors Granite Ventures and Walden International. Lucid will remain focused on both developers and organizations using Lucene and Solr.

"Apache Lucene/Solr open source search is quite promising," says Ravi Narayan, Director of Software Development at eBay, in a statement accompanying Lucid's announcement. "We are working with Lucid Imagination to use it for some of our search function needs." Officials at Lucid also made the point that the new $10 million in funding is more than twice the $4.7 million median deal size for 2009, reported by VentureSource.

"Companies want to find data as easily as consumers find stuff on the internet every day," says Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, in a statement. "Technology-savvy executives recognize they need enterprise-ready technology that can deliver search power that is tailored to fit their business needs and their marketplace. With this investment, Lucid Imagination can continue to satisfy the appetite for reliable, cost-effective differentiated search that quickly finds the right information wherever it is and delivers it to users."

The Lucene search library ranks amongst the top 5 Apache projects, installed at over 4,000 global companies. Although OStatic is primarily Drupal-based, our site's search is based on Lucene. According to Lucid Imagination officials, the Solr search server, which transforms the Lucene search library into a ready-to-use search platform for building applications, is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project.