Derek Lyman, co-founder, Dexrex LLC
An online service designed by two University of Massachusetts students to store their electronic messages has turned into a company developing a regulatory compliance service for businesses, while also providing an archiving system for individual users.
Dexrex LLC was founded in 2006 by Derek Lyman and Richard Tortora to enable PC users to archive and search e-mail and instant messages as well as text messages from several different messaging services.
Although the service has yet to generate revenue, it has collected 72,000 unique identifications from individuals. In May, the company garnered $600,000 from members of the Springfield-based angel investment group River Valley Investors. Lyman now plans to raise another $3 million to $5 million in venture capital in the next four months to grow the company.
Dexrex’s product is now being marketed to businesses to enable them to meet regulatory requirements related to the storage of electronic communications. Once it has collected enough data from users, it plans to generate profiles based on their message content, while allowing individual users to edit those profiles. Dexrex would then sell that data to marketers or website operators, who would then send users only the information they were seeking. For example, an online newspaper publisher could purchase information about users who noted an interest in news from that area to link to e-mail accounts for customized news updates. The approach is intended to empower consumers through tools that can export their data, Lyman said.
“We think of Dexrex as a personal information banking service,” he said.
In addition to data mining, Dexrex could provide parents with a way to monitor children’s texting activity, California-based investor and Dexrex advisory board member Dan Caulfield said. “It’s Google-like in the size of the opportunity,” he said. But, “the real value of the invention is that it provides a different future for the brokering of personal data.”
The archiving service is automated through plug-in applications linked to screen names registered with Dexrex. Users can delete archived messages at any time, Lyman said.
Globally, the number of IM accounts is projected to grow from 1.06 billion in 2007 to 1.7 billion in 2011, according to the Radicati Group Inc., a California-based research firm focused on the messaging market.
Local message archiving companies include Boston-based SupraSphere Inc., Dedham’s Sonian Inc. and Iron Mountain Digital, the Southborough-based technology division of Iron Mountain Inc. (NYSE: IRM).
Last year, Lyman and Tortora joined the UMass Amherst Entrepreneurship Initiative, where they met the angel investors who eventually provided the seed capital for Dexrex.
RSS Feeds
Comments (1)
Please Login/Register to post comments.