Vision Critical today announced the acquisition of DiscoverText, a robust cloud based text analytics solution. By combining DiscoverText capabilities with insight communities, Vision Critical will automate the organization and classification of hundreds of thousands of text records more efficiently and accurately than ever before, yielding better, faster decision making for its Insight Community clients. The deal comes on the heels of a $20M investment from OMERS Ventures last August.

"Our clients engage their customers and stakeholders through insight communities to make better, faster, more customer-centric decisions," said Scott Miller, Group CEO of Vision Critical. "As we continue to marry qualitative and quantitative analysis, this new technology combines a machine learning, language agnostic, text analytics solution with our insight communities. This is a game changer for us, for our partners and for our clients."

The science behind DiscoverText simplifies and accelerates the process of discovering insights through open ended surveys, email, discussions and social media conversations. Its unique algorithms enable businesses to analyze sentiment, discover trends and topics, and quickly identify emerging issues directly from customer feedback. Once incorporated into Vision Critical insight communities, customers will gain continuous and on-demand access to findings that are exceptionally intuitive and profoundly accurate.

"DiscoverText has the power to capture, filter, de-duplicate, cluster, search, human code and machine classify large numbers of small, unstructured units of text-features that are invaluable to Vision Critical customers," said Dr. Shulman, CEO of Texifter. "I'm pleased to join forces with Vision Critical as we take DiscoverText to the next level, and I look forward to helping customers continue to obtain critical insights from various audiences."

DiscoverText, part of Texifter, LLC, has been under development for 12 years and was created by Dr. Stuart Shulman, Founder and CEO of Texifter in the qualitative data analysis labs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pittsburgh thanks to more than $4M of grant money from the National Science Foundation. Since Texifter's founding in 2009, DiscoverText's customers have grown to include Google, QVC-UK, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and more than 40 others. Dr. Shulman will be joining Vision Critical as the Vice President of Text Analytics and Mark Hoy, CTO of Texifter, will be taking on the role of Senior Architect of Text Analytics.