Excalibur Technologies Corp, the San Diego company that started out by applying fuzzy logic to ease the problems dyslexics have with keyboards, has definitive agreement to acquire ConQuest Software Inc, privately-held Columbia, Maryland provider of advanced text management software. The management and product sets of both companies will remain in place. Excalibur plans to issue about 1.4m restricted shares of its common stock, worth about $22m, and 570,000 restricted share options to the ConQuest shareholders. ConQuest reported audited results for 1994 of about $1.8m in revenue but $4.4m in expenses. The aim is to bring together a combination of search and retrieval technologies, market coverage and management teams to serve the markets for on-line and Inter net publishing, document management, business and government intelligence and other document-driven applications. Integration of Excalibur’s pattern-matching technology and ConQuest’s semantic natural language text management technologies is planned to result in a comprehensive tool set for text, image and multimedia information management.
