Lucidworks Inc., the maker of an artificial intelligence-powered search engine for enterprises, today announced it has raised $100 million in funding to capture more market share.

The round was led by investment firms Francisco Partners and TPG Sixth Street Partners. It marks the latest growth milestone for San Francisco-based Lucidworks, which said it has doubled its revenue in each of the past three years.

The company’s flagship Fusion search engine enables enterprises to make their data explorable through a Googlelike interface. Fusion takes natural-language queries as input and generates personalized search results that are tailored for each user. The software decides what content to bring up with the help of machine learning models that can take into account over a dozen factors, from a user’s browsing history to his or her physical location.

Fusion also evaluates the structure of each query before running searches to ensure it’s interpreted correctly. The engine fixes spelling errors, looks at synonyms of the words that make up a request and extracts high-level concepts. It then rewrites the original query into a form that can be more easily understood by the AI models responsible for finding matching results. 

Fusion allows  companies to fine-tune these algorithms based on their needs. A retailer that uses Fusion as a search interface for its e-commerce website can tailor results according to shoppers’ location, purchase history and product views. A company looking to make internal business records more easily explorable for employees, in turn, could personalize search results based on what division a workers belongs to and the records they viewed in the past.

Lucidworks claims that Fusion is used by 40% of the Fortune 1000. Notable adopters include AT&T Inc., Morgan Stanley Inc., Aetna Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd.

The $100 million capital injection that Lucidworks announced today adds to the $109 million it had raised previously. The extra funds should make it easier for the company to keep pace with the aggressive feature release roadmap of bigger rival Elastic N.V., the other major player in the enterprise search market. Elastic recently shelled out $234 million for endpoint security provider Endgame Inc. in a deal meant to make its platform more appealing to cybersecurity teams. 

Photo: Lucidworks