QL2's software digs deep for data

What: QL2 Software, based in Seattle

Who: Christopher Buckingham, president and CEO

What it does: Pulls data from the Web and other sources and packages it so that customers can see trends and patterns.

Employees: 73

Data mining: Search engines don't crawl the entire Web, missing things such as the information you get back when you enter a catalog product number on an online retailer's site. QL2 specifically searches out this hard-to-reach data for clients.

Travel specialty: QL2 has found that companies will pay to track what their competitors are charging. This pricing information is particularly volatile in the travel industry, where airfares can change as often as four times a day.

Sales are doubling: QL2 hasn't taken any venture funding and is profitable. Buckingham said sales double every year and hit $3.1 million in 2005. It charges its customers an annual subscription fee, and its renewal rate is about 85 percent.

Acquisition possible: Buckingham said the six-year-old company thought a lot about being sold at the beginning but isn't so interested now. "But obviously if someone were to come along and make a nice offer, we'd certainly listen."

Customer base: QL2 has about 140 customers, including 30 in the Fortune 500. And though travel is one focus, its customers are also in the auto-parts, pharmaceutical and financial-services industries.

Moving forward: In addition to Web pages, QL2 can pull data out of Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF documents as well as from words embedded in images. Next the company wants to plumb legacy data fields, like mainframes, and application-specific environments.

Quote: "We want to be able to connect to data just about wherever it resides and be able to integrate it into whatever the customer wants."

— Kim Peterson