ClearForest

ClearForest was an Israeli software company founded in 1998 by Dr. Ronen Feldman, Dr. Yonatan Aumann, and Oren Etzioni. The firm established its headquarters outside Boston, with a development center in Or Yehuda, Israel. Dr. Feldman, a recognized figure in data mining, served as the chief scientist, while Dr. Aumann, an expert in distributed computing, took on the roles of co-founder and CTO. ClearForest specialized in text analytics and text mining, developing software that could analyze, interpret, and extract business intelligence from large volumes of unstructured textual content.

The company's core business involved providing a tagging platform and analytical products that transformed unstructured text from sources like emails, documents, and news feeds into structured, machine-readable data. This allowed clients to identify key entities, facts, events, and relationships that were previously hidden within the text. ClearForest's business model focused on offering these text-driven business intelligence solutions to large enterprises. Its client roster included prominent names such as The Dow Chemical Co., Elsevier Science, Dow Jones & Co., and Thomson Financial. The firm developed specific industry modules for sectors like financial services, life sciences, and automotive manufacturing, addressing needs such as equity valuation and early warnings for product quality issues.

A significant milestone for ClearForest was its acquisition by Reuters in April 2007 for an estimated $25 million. Following the acquisition, Reuters integrated ClearForest's technology to enhance its search capabilities, particularly for financial information. The technology became the foundation for services like OpenCalais, a free web service and API for automatic metadata generation and named-entity recognition. Before the acquisition, ClearForest was a venture-backed company, with its last funding round in 2005 led by Greylock Ventures and including other investors like Pitango Venture Capital, Walden Israel, and JPMorgan Partners.

Keywords: text analytics, text mining, business intelligence, unstructured data, named-entity recognition, semantic analysis, data mining, natural language processing, metadata generation, OpenCalais, information extraction, knowledge discovery, content tagging, Reuters acquisition, Yonatan Aumann, Ronen Feldman, enterprise software, financial data analysis, semantic web services, document analysis