ClearForest

Founded in 1998, ClearForest had its headquarters just outside Boston and a development center in Or Yehuda. The company was acquired by Reuters in April, 2007. It now markets its services under the names Calais, OpenCalais, and OneCalais.

ClearForest was previously venture-backed; its last funding round was led by Greylock Ventures and closed in 2005. Other investors included DB Capital Partners, Pitango, Walden Israel, Booz Allen, JP Morgan Partners and HarbourVest Partners.

On February 7, 2008 Reuters announced the launch of Open Calais, a named-entity recognition and semantic analysis service that uses ClearForest technology.

On April 30, 2007, Reuters announced that it would acquire ClearForest. Sources estimate the acquisition to be for $25 Million.

ClearForest offers several hosted solutions, including:

OpenCalais, a free web service and open API (for commercial and non-commercial use) that performs named-entity recognition and enables automatic metadata generation using the ClearForest financial module.

Semantic Web Services (SWS), an on-demand service that makes ClearForest's natural language processing tools available as a standard web service. A subset of ClearForest's capabilities is available via SWS at no cost.

Gnosis, a free Firefox extension that uses SWS to analyze the content of a web page. Gnosis identifies named entities such as people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page being viewed. Gnosis also automatically processes pages from Wikipedia, providing additional links for people, geographies and other entities which were not explicitly linked within the subject article.