Pasadena-based software developer X1 Discovery Inc. is closing out 2019 with a series of big changes.
The company moved to a larger headquarters downtown in late November after graduating from Idealab, a startup incubator based in Pasadena and founded by investor and entrepreneur Bill Gross.
In early December X1 hired Georges Sabongui as chief commercial officer to help manage growing demand for its data search software. The company also promoted former product engineer Nick Torrecillas to vice president of products.
“Adding key leaders will equip us to meet our rapidly growing customer base, enabling X1 to extend our market leadership position,” X1 Chief Executive Craig Carpenter said in a statement.
For 2020, X1 expects to ramp up its investment in people and increase its headcount by 50%-80%, mainly in its marketing and development divisions.
“From a people perspective, X1 plans to aggressively grow our engineering and global sales and channel teams to meet rapidly increasing customer demand,” Carpenter said.
The company on Dec. 3 launched a new, dedicated scanner to capture Twitter content in a forensically sound manner, according to the company. The technology is a follow-up development to its social network scanning software, Social Discovery. which, according to a press release, allows “investigators, lawyers, law enforcement and enterprises to instantly find, collect and analyze social media and web content and evidence in a legally defensible manner.”
According to the company’s website, Jim Derouin, who previously served as Forever 21 Inc.’s director of finance said of X1, “I am a long-time X1 fan. First thing I did when I got to Forever 21 was to get X1 and index all my predecessor’s e-mails and documents which made my transition so much easier.”
Carpenter said X1 would seek additional growth opportunities in the coming year.
“From a product perspective, X1 will continue to extend our market-leading social discovery technology, add even more coverage of business collaboration tools (like Slack) and deepen our integrations with technology partners,” he said.
One of X1’s technology partners is
Chicago-based eDiscovery software developer Relativity.
Relativity and X1 teamed up in October to integrate X1’s software capabilities into Relativity’s existing legal software platform. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
At the time of the agreement, Relativity Chief Product Officer Chris Brown said legal professionals using its products “will be able to combine X1’s innovative endpoint technology with the performance of our platform, eliminating the cumbersome process of manual data hand-offs and allowing them to get to the pertinent data in their case faster.”
X1 was co-founded by Idealab’s Gross, X1 Chief Legal Officer John Patzakis and Idealab Chief Executive Marcia Goodstein in 2005.
“Being an Idealab company was a terrific benefit to X1 as Idealab companies are created to address big problems — in our case finding data ‘in the wild’ for productivity purposes,” Carpenter said.
“Being incubated at Idealab allowed X1 to grow at our own pace, experimenting with new ways of doing things along the way to our customers’ benefit,” he added.
X1’s government risk and compliance software platform is designed to securely collect, store and share data in the cloud.
In addition to fiscal support from Idealab, X1 is backed by Brentwood-based Palisades Growth Capital and George Kadifa, founder of San Mateo-based venture investors Sumeru Equity Capital.
Carpenter said the company has raised $25 million to date. In October, X1 closed a $5.1 million Series B funding round.
“While 2019 has been a very successful and productive year, we expect 2020 to be significantly bigger,” said Carpenter.
