Our sister paper Unigram.X has tracked down Uniplex Inc’s erstwhile president and chief executive Jeff Waxman at one of his current haunts, a six-year-old start-up called Mentalix Inc, where at least on paper he’s playing the same role he did at Uniplex. However sources say that the job’s more titular than real, with Waxman wanting to stay in the Boston area. The Dallas, Texas company is hoping to become a dominant supplier of image-based software by 1995 and includes on its board former Ashton-Tate Corp chief Ed Esber and Sun Microsystems Inc’s former chief financial officer Robert Smith. It estimates that it could be deriving revenues from its target markets such as publishing and CAD/CAM worth $24m by 1996. Rather hoary for a start-up, Mentalix has been through a couple of incranations, beginning as a consultancy and going on to develop scanner interfaces for the old Apollo Computer Inc workstation line. A bootstrap operation, it attracted its first venture capital in August 1990, a $1.2m investment from Sunwestern Investment Group. Looking to go public in the next year, it is now out for a $1m second round of finnacing, to be used primarily for sales and marketing, an area where it has not yet devoted much effort, and it needs a vice-president of sales and marketing and two sales people. However, its current product, a multiple still image windowing and manipulation tool called Pixel!FX, has been out for a while first on Sun Sparcsystems and Hewlett-Packard Co 9000/400s last December, then on DECstation 5000s and HP 700s in January and finally on IBM Corp RS/6000s in July. It has generated about $325,000. A Santa Cruz Operation Inc version is due by the end of the calendar year and a revision adding further functionality is in the works. The long-term plan is to migrate to Windows-based personal computers after it has established dominance and market share on Unix systems.
