Four year-old UK knowledge management company Multicosm Ltd has opened offices in San Francisco, following increased funding and an expansion in its customer base, including orders from pharmaceutical giant Unilever and the Reuters’ news agency. Multicosm won 3 million pounds in funding last year from 3i, Amadeus and the NatWest IT fund, plus a helping hand from an anonymous ‘angel’ investor.
I’ve made enough mistakes on the technology side to write a book, says chief executive William Nisen. It’s easy to make the classic error of remaining a pure technology company by pumping all your profits into R&D. From the word go I wanted Multicosm to be a market-driven, international company. Nisen, whose track record includes a stint at Lotus Development, says his priority is to keep raising his company’s profile by stepping up its sales and marketing efforts in the US, already the source of half of Multicosm’s revenues.
Multicosm was formed in collaboration with the Multimedia Group at the University of Southampton, when research staff decided to capitalize on their research into hypertext. The company now employs 25 people in the UK and five in San Francisco. Its technology allows people to link together existing documents to produce a series of hyperlinks of associated information, without interfering with the original document. It is still used by universities either side of the Atlantic to support computer- based teaching applications and distance learning, and a voice- enabled version allows workers – for example oil-rig engineers who cannot use a keyboard when working in remote conditions – to access various sources of information in different formats via verbal commands. There is also a web-enabled version, Webcosm, for integrating hyperlinks gathered from the internet.
Nisen predicts that the demand for knowledge management software will explode over the next few years, but is confident that his company can continue to compete in a market already packed with suppliers. A year and a half ago, companies like Verity and PC Docs began rebadging themselves as knowledge management experts, but now these companies are coming to us, says Nisen. A key competitor, says Nisen, is Cambridge-based Autonomy, whose San Francisco offices are only a stone’s throw away from Multicosm’s new US headquarters. But while Autonomy chose to float on Easdaq in August 1998, Nisen is realistic that his company may not make it to an IPO. An offer of acquisition by the right company, he admits, would be considered.
