Lucidworks is a San Francisco, California-based enterprise search technology company offering an application development platform, commercial support, consulting, training and value-add software for open sourceApache Lucene and Apache Solr. Lucidworks is a private company founded as Lucid Imagination in 2007 and publicly launched on January 26, 2009. The company was renamed to Lucidworks on August 8, 2012. The company received Series A funding from Granite Ventures and Walden International in Sept 2008; In-Q-Tel is a strategic investor. In August 2014, Lucidworks closed an $8 million Series C round with Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures and Walden International participating. In November 2015, Lucidworks closed a $21 million Series D round with Allegis Capital, and existing investors Shasta Ventures and Granite Ventures participating. 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. 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. The company follows a Professional Open Source model to target organizations evaluating or already using the Apache Lucene/Solr open source search platform for their search applications. The company also offers several free, certified distributions of Lucene and Solr, which include additional utilities, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. Apache Lucene and Solr originally established a following without commercial support; however, as the market adoption for commercially supported open source grows, enterprise search application developers have sought similar models for these applications as well. Lucidworks is the primary commercial steward for the Solr project employing one-third of the project's committers and contributing 70% of the code in addition to producing the annual Lucene/Solr Revolution conference, most recently named Activate. The Lucidworks founding technical team consisted of Marc Krellenstein, a veteran in the enterprise search industry and several key contributors and committers to the Lucene project, Grant Ingersoll, Erik Hatcher, and Yonik Seeley, in addition to advisor Doug Cutting.
Business model
Lucidworks operates primarily with a subscription-based business model with their Lucidworks Fusion platform for designing, building, and deploying big data applications. Lucidworks also offers subscriptions for the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using open source search software. On September 18, 2014, Lucidworks released Lucidworks Fusion, a platform for building search and discovery applications that includes popular search technology Apache Solr and computation framework Apache Spark in its core. 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. In September 2017, Reddit teamed with Lucidworks to build their new search application. On March 6, 2018, Lucidworks released Lucidworks Site Search, an embeddable, easy-to-configure, out-of-the-box site search solution that runs in the cloud, or on premise.
