Briefs

From St Louis Post-Dispatch, 06/19/2003

A startup founded by St. Louis entrepreneur J.J. Stupp and Silicon Valley guru Benjamin Brink is proving an exception to the current VC drought.

Later this month, they will launch Data Search Systems Inc. - a computer hardware company based on "data mining" technology licensed exclusively from Washington University.

The startup begins life with $2 million in backing, including $600,000 from lead investor Bush-O'Donnell & Co., the investment company headed by Jim O'Donnell.

The technology - developed by a team of computer scientists led by Professor Ron Indeck - conducts very fast searches on data not easily indexed. About 80 percent of all data fall into this category, said Stupp, from e-mails and corporate documents to genomics.

How fast is fast? "What takes people 200 hours to do, we can do in one hour."

Stupp, best known as creator of the TableTalk educational game products, comes by her interest naturally. A physics major in college, she has an MBA from Washington U. and has advised tech companies since selling TableTalk in 2000.

Here is the full story.