RiverGlass, Inc.

RiverGlass, Inc., established in December 2003, operated as a specialized provider of intelligent web information analysis and data management solutions. The company's core technology was born out of eight years of research at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the same laboratory that developed the Mosaic web browser. This intellectual property, developed under the guidance of Michael Welge, head of the NCSA's Automated Learning Group, formed the basis of RiverGlass's offerings. IllinoisVENTURES, a firm focused on commercializing University of Illinois projects, selected RiverGlass as its inaugural startup investment.

In April 2004, Kirk Dauksavage, previously a sales chief at CheckFree Corp., was appointed CEO. His leadership was instrumental in guiding the company from its early stages. The firm secured its initial funding of $250,000 in May 2004, followed by an additional $1.5 million later that year, eventually raising a total of $7.9 million from investors including IllinoisVENTURES, RPM Ventures, and Country Life Insurance Company. The company's primary clients included government agencies in defense, intelligence, and law enforcement, as well as Fortune 2000 corporations like pharmaceutical companies and insurers. For these clients, RiverGlass provided solutions for context-based search, e-discovery, and analysis of unstructured data to identify threats, market opportunities, and competitive intelligence.

The company's software utilized an ontological semantics approach, moving beyond simple keyword searches to understand the context and meaning within vast amounts of data. This enabled clients to sift through massive datasets from the web and internal sources to find relevant information and uncover hidden relationships in real-time. The Illinois State Police was an early, significant customer, using the system to analyze intelligence data. On October 13, 2011, RiverGlass was acquired by Allen Systems Group (ASG), a provider of data management solutions, for an undisclosed sum.

Keywords: data analysis, web intelligence, unstructured data, natural language processing, context-based search, information analysis, e-discovery, government intelligence, law enforcement technology, corporate intelligence, market intelligence, threat mitigation, ontological semantics, NCSA, University of Illinois, Allen Systems Group, ASG Technologies, Kirk Dauksavage, competitive analysis, business intelligence software