MetaCarta Gets Added Investment from In-Q-Tel
By VentureWire Staff Reporters
MetaCarta Inc., a company that develops software for linking geographic information and text searching, said it entered a strategic agreement with In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. The deal consists of an additional investment from In-Q-Tel and a development agreement to further enhance the MetaCarta technology.
Ron Matros, president and chief executive of MetaCarta, declined to discuss the specifics of the investment deal and said he could not disclose the details of the development agreement until a new product comes out.
The investment is an add-on to MetaCarta's Series B round of financing, which initially closed in January 2004 with $6.5 million. Sevin Rosen Funds led the round, which also included Solstice Capital, Chevron Technology Ventures and Chisholm Private Capital Partners.
In-Q-Tel first invested in MetaCarta in the company's $700,000 Series A round in October 2002.
The company released its flagship product, the MetaCarta Geographic Text Search Appliance, two years ago. The system combines a search engine with a global information system, enabling a company to link unstructured documents and databases with geographic content. With the assistance of a natural language processing infrastructure that identifies implied and explicit references, users can type in keywords to find relevant documents. The search result appears on a map, identifying the document with its geographic relevance.
The Geographic Text Search system is intended for use within the intelligence and military markets. MetaCarta geOdrive, which is a similar geographic text search system, is specifically designed for energy companies.
Founded in 1999, Cambridge, Mass.-based MetaCarta has also raised $1.3 million in seed financing from DARPA and angel investors. Researchers at MIT first developed the technology.
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