Startup Of The Week: Krugle

Looking for a piece of code on the Internet? Need a better way to navigate the code your internal programmers developed? Krugle, which started as a searchable repository of publically available source code--at last count, 2.6 billion lines of code--has created a search appliance for the enterprise. Rhymes with Google, but they're unrelated.
--John Foley KRUGLE HEADQUARTERS: Menlo Park, Calif.

PRODUCT: Krugle Enterprise Edition

PRINCIPALS: Steve Larsen, co-founder, CEO; Ken Krugler, co-founder, CTO

INVESTORS: Emergence Capital, Rustic Canyon, First Round Capital, Omidyar VenturesEARLY CUSTOMERS: Persistent Systems, SAIC

GEEK CENTRAL Krugle crawls, parses, and indexes code from hundreds of public and private software repositories, including SourceForge, CollabNet, Yahoo's developer network, Microsoft's Codeplex, and IBM's developerWorks. Software developers use it to search for a piece of code--a MIME parser, for example. They can save, share, and comment on their searches. APPLIANCE Introduced as a code search system on the Web, Krugle last week was preparing for the imminent release of its technology as an appliance for business environments. The rack-mountable appliance builds an index of code located in source code management systems, bug databases, and wikis. It comes with plug-ins for Eclipse and Visual Studio and an API for other development environments. Twenty companies, including some with thousands of programmers, have beta tested the product. WHO'S WHO Company namesake Krugler is a longtime coder. CEO Larsen is coming off two short management stints: six months as COO of Better Life Media Group and, before that, 10 months as CEO of BixFix. BUSINESS MODEL Krugle first delivered its core technology through its own site, Krugle.org. Then it struck deals with IBM, CollabNet, SourceForge, and other source code centers to distribute its technology more widely. Its new appliances are the primary revenue-producing part of the business. Pricing hasn't been published, but the appliance starts at approximately $25,000 for an annual subscription. Krugle's search engine is built on Apache and other open source software. Koders is a competitor. TIMELINE