WINSTON-SALEM & CHAPEL HILL – Two North Carolina companies are entering a technical partnership to bring a fully integrated solution to enterprise data management teams seeking to build semantic-capable, secure data fabrics.

Winston-Salem-based Fluree, which built what it calls an immutable semantic graph data platform, will partner with Chapel Hill’s Lead Semantics, which built natural language processing technology, and the collaboration between the companies will be known as TextDistil.

According to a statement, the core focus for the product will be companies operating in highly regulated industries such as fintech, banking, and insurance.

“Text as a source of knowledge and information is fundamental yet there aren’t any end-to-end solutions that tame the complexity in handling text,” said Brian Platz, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Fluree in a statement.  “While most organizations have wrangled structured or semi-structured data into a centralized data platform, unstructured data remains forgotten and underleveraged.”

The product will help convert unstructured data assets—like text—into semantic-capable enterprise knowledge.

The companies describe it as bringing “unstructured data into the structured context of businesses’ respective operational transactional worlds with security, traceability, and audit-capabilities provided by Fluree’s immutable ledger,” according to a statement.

“Within the confines of unstructured data may lie the cure for a rare disease, an audit trail of customer interactions for regulatory bodies, or the key to a previously unsolvable business logistics challenge,” said Platz.  “We are proud to provide the semantic graph database backing the TextDistil initiative, bringing trust, traceability, and interoperability to enterprise unstructured information.”

Structured and unstructured data is being created rapidly—IDC has predicted growth from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes in 2025—five times as much data to analyze and protect in seven years.

Of all data, according to Fluree, unstructured data is about 80 percent of the total. The business value of codifying and analyzing these data points is still not yet fully realized for most businesses, as this data can and should be leveraged as part of a company’s data fabric strategy.

That’s why they’ve collaborated on TextDistil.  Lead Semantics selected Fluree, according to the companies.