Thetus CEO Danielle Forsyth can see the forest for the trees

Danielle Forsyth, CEO and cofounder of Portland, Oregon-based Thetus, can’t get her semantic modeling head around the subject of being a woman CEO—even though the Portland Business Journal just named her Woman Entrepreneur of the Year.

She’d prefer to talk about her infrastructure software, thanks very much. Besides, Ms. Forsyth parries, “I’ve only ever been female, so I don’t really have a clear understanding of what’s easier or harder.”

Still, the Montreal native lets slip a thought: “Companies want to have females, especially as we move from having our core [software] assets in development and focus on design,” she says. “Women tend to play a fairly signifi cant role on the defi nition and design side.”

At least that’s Ms. Forsyth’s experience. “I don’t know if it’s unique, but we fi nd that it’s easier to fi nd female semantic
modelers than males.”

Happily married with a son now all grown up and an ageless pooch named Zeus, Ms. Forsyth looks back on her formative years spent at Hewlett-Packard—1980 to 1990—where opportunities seemed to be hers for the asking. “I was at Hewlett-Packard during those excellent
years when divisions were really run as organizations. “The division was running its own business and competing aggressively through quality-based differentiation and I just found it was a great place to learn about every single area of the technology business. When you’re working in small organizations, you can kind of pick and choose things to pursue.”

In 1990, she moved to Tektronix for a two-year stint before working with a string of companies over the next 10 years.

Thetus was born in 2002, when sensible people thought carefully about launching startups. Ms. Forsyth and co-founder and CTO Roy Hall both grew up in 3D graphics, having worked for years on rendering and procedural modeling problems. To
hear Ms. Forsyth tell it, applying graphics techniques to the science of organizing knowledge was a natural. “When you look at a 3D scene, you’re working at a specific eye-point so you really only draw stuff that’s relevant,” she says. “The eye-point is the area of interest. We use semantics to
give a point of view on the information.”

Semantic modeling, of course, requires plugging into dictionaries (medical, electronics, whatever) and structures that pinpoint connections to establish context and relationships. “We tend to work with people who don’t know explicitly what they’re looking for,” Ms. Forsyth says. “Semantically based knowledge modeling is really for people to discover things, to see whether things are related, to capture knowledge as it’s gathered.” It’s the difference between a database and a knowledge base.

 

It’s one thing for a gas utility, for example, to know there are 1,400 incidents of people accidentally slicing into gas pipes in a given year. But it’s quite another to know half are caused by second-language people who can’t fathom Englishlanguage instructions or are disinclined to wait two days to receive a pipe location map before they dig. With modeling tools, Ms. Forsyth says, the utility can see the context of events and act preemptively against likely outcomes.

There must be something to it. In-Q-Tel, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s venture arm, along with San Franciscobased energy VC Nth Power and Vancouver-based Yaletown Partners, are backers. Thetus customers include, besides utilities and other non-government organizations, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Forsyth can’t say much about government funding or the company’s intelligence work, except to note that it came about by accident. Thetus was working with a DoE lab engaged in Columbia River silt research and the government offi cial who brought the company in on that
project ended up being rotated to the CIA, where he found new things for Thetus to do. “It wasn’t a natural fi t,” Ms. Forsyth says. “Nobody in the company has a government background.”

Business is pretty evenly split between commercial and government sales, Ms. Forsyth says. Thetus often sells through integrators like Accenture and Herndon, Virginia-based McDonald Bradley to take advantage of their expertise in specifi c markets.
“I expect the company will be having a break-even year,” she says, adding a revealing caveat. “We don’t give out revenue numbers as we have been approached by numerous buyers.”