Thetus Makes ‘Non-Text Data’ Meaningful, Searchable, Manageable

by Kate McPherron

Thetus develops knowledge discovery solutions designed to keep pace with the exponential growth of non-text data. The company’s infrastructure software helps organizations maximize the value of data collected from sensors, satellites and other devices. Headquartered in Portland, Thetus is a privately held corporation funded through a combination of private and institutional equity. In September 2005, Thetus’ technology was identified for its potential benefits to the intelligence community, and the company established a strategic investment agreement with In-Q-Tel, a private venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Thetus is led by a team of professionals with decades of experience and a proven track record of innovation in 2D and 3D data, large enterprise and Internet software systems, procedural modeling, security, image processing and storage management.

We currently have well-developed partnerships with companies that do integration: Raytheon, for instance. Spatial Business Systems, another of our partners, is playing a major role in helping us penetrate the energy market. We have a number of integration partners that would ideally do all of the deployment, but in the short term, we will still be responsible for some of the groundwork to ensure our customers receive timely and well-supported solutions.   Having said that, many large-scale integrators take some time to build up a practice around new technology, so we will have to backfill for a period of time. One of the ways we’ve gotten around that is to work with some of the smaller integration partners that are a little more nimble.  

KM: Tell us about why you chose this location (34 NW First Avenue in Old Town).  

DF: Getting back to the Portland angle, this location is a perfect example of how wonderful it is to conduct business in a city such as this. There’s nothing like being able to invite someone in from Northern or Southern California and tell them to take the MAX to the office, jump off, walk into the building and see 15 bicycles parked in the lobby. It really says something about the company you are. We still don’t have anybody who drives to work. We recently placed fourth in the Bike Transportation Alliance Commuter Challenge.   This is a group of people who love the lifestyle of Portland. We’ve only ever been in the downtown area and we won’t be moving out to the ’burbs, mainly because we found a group of people who want to take mass transit, want to ride their bikes, want to walk to work.   We’ve had wonderful support from several local businesses. The owner of this particular building, Perkins Coie, has been great in that they’ve scaled with us. Our lease is structured in a way that not only facilitates, but encourages growth. By nature, high-tech companies rarely enjoy a steady state – you’re either up or down. Our lease allows us to move into other properties owned by the same landlord without penalty. That gives us the flexibility to feel as though we can make the long-term commitment. Those are things I don’t think you find outside of Portland.  

KM: What else do you like about the Portland infrastructure?  

DF: We had a number of excellent candidates apply following the September Business Journal article and we’ve actually hired at least one of them! We also have relationships with PSU, OSU and OHSU. Those relationships were very instrumental in getting the company started. They provided us a test bed for the software as well as access to a group of professionals who understood the problem space really well on the life science side as well as the earth science side. They really allowed us to validate our belief that our product offering was something that was needed across a broad range of markets.  

All of those things have been good. We did raise money here. We did a small series A round, and while we have investors from California and Colorado, the core group of investors is from the area. We haven’t found anything that holds us back here.  

Because of the founder’s experience in out-of-state companies, a lot of our core team did move here from out-of-state. Even though we’ve lived here a long time, we’ve done a lot of work in California and Colorado. While most of our customers are not based here, I’ve never had any of our customers not want to visit us. People want to come to Portland. One of our investors owns the Westin. When you put people in the Westin or Lucia and suggest they walk or take the MAX over here, they just can’t believe we live like this. That said, we have a couple of California transplants who are experiencing some “issues” adjusting to the Portland winter!  

KM: Do you have plans to expand anywhere else?  

DF: We certainly would consider the major high-tech metro areas for sales and marketing functions. Portland is too modest – we’re not good at beating our own chest and saying we’re the best. It’s almost illegal. If you look at the software companies that have been successful, they’re largely infrastructure companies. Portland-based software companies are good at delivering solid, technically sophisticated solutions, but we’re not trusted as a consumer software mecca, nor are we really trusted as a marketing mecca. That’s sort of ironic, given the number of consumer companies that are leading national brands on the athletic side.  

But there isn’t a lot of cross-pollination there. We in the infrastructure software business are extremely trusted and we’re in a good place, but if you want to build a sales and marketing hub, there are other logical locations, New York, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, etc.  

Quite honestly, though, these days it doesn’t matter so much where you’re located. So we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. The energy industry is primarily located in the Denver-Houston-Calgary area, but intelligence is in the D.C. area. The intelligence community has a problem in that they don’t know what they don’t know, and our solution is very well suited to them. But bringing defense contractors up to speed takes a lot of time and energy; they’re not accustomed to early innovation.  

KM: What are some of your challenges?  

DF: Being an infrastructure company, it’s sometimes difficult to express the full potential of our product from an end-user perspective. We’ve actually developed an end-to-end solution for one of our intelligence contracts. We were the only ones who could imagine what it could do.  

That process has actually helped us to inspire our customers to envision how our infrastructure can solve the specific problems they’re facing. It’s a great feeling when you’re talking to an existing or potential customer and you see the light go on and they say, “Wow! Could you do this?” or “I know exactly how we could use that!” And then, of course, they want it packaged and delivered yesterday! We’re really going to have to build up partnerships and make sure we continue to staff the company with people who possess versatile skill sets.  

We also have to build a lot of infrastructure to support those people – we’ve got to become more channel-centric. That’s a huge initiative for us throughout 2006. We haven’t found a lot of people who understand the challenges of building a channel-driven organization. We have a lot of interest in finding people who possess that experience and can fill those positions. As we grow from a startup into a more established business, we also need to formalize a lot of internal and external processes. We need to deal with same growth issues every other company does.  

KM: What about technology partnerships?  

DF: We have a very complementary relationship with visualization, analytics and data-mining vendors. Spotfire and Thinkmap are visualization and interactive analysis vendors we’ve partnered with. For different applications, you want to leverage different visualization approaches. We see these vendors as both a channel – because they have existing partnerships in place – and as a partner in the development of our capabilities. Spotfire is very well adopted on the life science side, so we see that partnership as a sales and marketing channel as well as a means of offering additional product features for our customers. We also work very closely with Thinkmap, which has developed an excellent tool for visualizing knowledge.  

Spotfire is also an In-Q-Tel-funded company. There are probably 15 of the In-Q-Tel-funded companies with which we have extremely complementary relationships. That’s one of the great things about In-Q-Tel: it allows us to work closely with people who have complementary offerings.  

KM: What are future product directions?  

DF: We have a long list of product capabilities, some of them around user interface, user experience and Web integration. We are very interested in developing additional capabilities that illustrate how customers can best use the product.  

As far as future generations of the product, we have hundreds of enhancements we would like to be able to offer. Most of the next two years will probably be consumed with integrating our capability into others’ offerings. We’re most often not a standalone solution. For instance, someone may have a lab-management solution or GIS solution into which they would like to integrate a knowledge discovery component.  

Learn more about Thetus at http://www.thetus.com  

About the author

Kate McPherron, a technology evangelist, has helped technology and industrial firms manage and market their products and services for the past 20 years. She can be reached at klm54@cornell.edu.