Lucid Wraps Up $10M Series B

Early this morning, Lucid Imagination wrapped up a $10 million Series B funding round from Granite Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Walden International, bringing its total amount of capital raised to $16 million.

I spoke to CEO Erik Gries yesterday about the deal, and he declined to state the valuation, but he was pleased as punch that he wrapped up the fund-raising in about three months. He also said the investment was an up round and “positive for everyone involved.”

Gries, a former EIR at Granite, joined the San Mateo, Calif.-based company when it raised its Series A round in late 2008.

The company powers enterprise search technologies using the open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology. Or, as Gries explained it, Lucid is to Lucene/Solr search technology what RedHat is to the Linux operating system.

Gries said that the new funding will be used to accelerate the adoption of Lucene/Solr search technology outside U.S. borders.

Despite the fact that his company competes against the mammoth search giant Google and its enterprise search appliance, in addition to other search-related startups, Gries was bullish about his company’s chances. He said Lucid went from zero to several million in annual revenue, thanks in large part to a growing customer base that includes AT&T, Nike, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, Zappos, The Motley Fool, Macy’s and Cisco that have adopted the Lucene/Solr search technology for expert location systems and to help in distribution.

More info is on the company press release.