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Excerpts from article - the full text is in copies of India Abroad on the newsstand.

The Central Intelligence Agency-backed, private non-profit venture catalyst firm, In-Q-Tel, has invested millions of dollars in an Indian start up, Stratify, formerly known as Purple Yogi. In-Q-Tel invests in technology that addresses critical CIA needs and has the potential to become commercially available. In September, just days before the attacks on the World Trade Center, the intelligence agency pumped between $1 million and $5 million into Stratify. The company declined to reveal the exact amount. Headquartered at Mountain View, CA, Stratify was founded in September 1999 by entrepreneurial wizard Rakesh Mathur (IIT Bombay - BTech '78 ME), former co-founder of the successful company Junglee that was ultimately bought out by Amazon.com, and his friends Ramana Venkata and Ramesh Subramonian, former Intel Microcomputer Research Lab scientists.

In-Q-Tel plans to use Stratify's technology to trawl through thousands of documents that exist on its files and on the Web. Startify's technology platform manages unstructured data, much like an Oracle database which is a tool to manage structured data. Structured data is all about information neatly sorted into rows and columns, residing in a database like Oracle, DB2, Sybase or MS SQL server. This is the kind of information that sits in proposals, reports, news articles, analyzes, e-mails, MS Word, Powerpoint and text documents.

The ability to organize and present structured and unstructured data in a usable form to the end user has become a critical requirement for fast moving organizations seeking to gain an edge in the market, and make informed decisions. This is what attracted the CIA toward Stratify. Stratify's technology is not only useful to companies that need to sort realms of data floating around. Its biggest clientele may be the CIA and the US government. "We are building a portfolio of highly innovative and important commercial techncilogies that can help tackle the toughest infotech challenges the CIA faces today.

In-Q-Tel's CIA connection does not bother Mehta or his team, They see it as a vindication of the superiority of the technology they have developed. They see it as a vindication of the superiority of the technology they have developed. "It is an extremely important validation of our technology, and it is an honor to serve the needs of US national security. Government agencies, particularly the CIA, have vast amounts of unstructured information, much more than a typical Global 1000 corporation. If our solution is good enough for the CIA, it is surely good enough for an average multinational", says Mehta.

Like most ventures focused on the individual consumer in the Internet space, Purple Yogi found itself floundering soon. The company needed to look at alternative revenue models and the enterprise market seemed the best place. "We decided to focus on the enterprise market because there is even greater leverage and application of our software love it. However, large enterprises have significant budgets and have a significant challenge in managing and leveraging unstructured information," says Mehta, who joined the company in February.

Two months ago. Purple Yogi's transformation from a dot-com venture focused on the individual customer to that servicing the requirements of large institutions was complete. The change of name only served to underline this. "The company's mission changed and the old name, PurpleYogi, did not adequately convey the new mission. We started life as a consumer-oriented company, building a new Web search tool. Earlier this year, we decided to focus on the enterprise market and build a platform to enable large corporations and government agencies. Therefore, a new name was called for," explains Mehta.

Over the next 18 months, Stratify plans to grow in a conteolled manner, hire in sales and business development and finally break even by early 2003.

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