On February 12th, 2007, Rapid-I was awarded for being one of the top 10 start-up companies in the first round of the nation-wide German business start-up competition start2grow. Rapid-I is a software and consulting company helping its customers to significantly improve their efficiency and profitability with innovative data mining and business intelligence solutions.

Rapid-I was founded on December 8th, 2006, by Ingo Mierswa, the project leader of the open-source data mining project YALE, and Ralf Klinkenberg, who initiated this project in 2001, in order to better serve the needs of professional users of YALE and to provide innovative data mining solutions and services.

The start2grow competition is organized by the dortmund-project, an initiative of the city of Dortmund in Germany. This competition is open to start-up companies from all over Germany. In the first round of this competition, which started in November 2006 and ended on February 12th, 2007, 82 teams competed for the prices. The top ten teams were awarded 2500 Euro each. The second round of this competition ends on March 28th, 2007, and is not limited to the participants of the first round, but open to all interested German start-up companies.

With YALE, Rapid-I provides one of the world leading open source products for the intelligent analysis of large volumes of data. The discovery and leverage of unused business intelligence from existing data enables better informed decisions and allows for process optimization. Rapid-I also offers all data mining services: consulting, support, customization, individual system integration, and data analysis. So, its customers faster achieve the benefits of automated data mining for their businesses.

The YALE project started in 2001 at the Artificial Intelligence Unit at University of Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany, where its underlying concepts were developed and where its initial architecture was designed. In 2004, the YALE project moved to SourceForge, became an international project with developers and contributors from many different countries who keep on improving and extending YALE. Since 2004, the number of data mining operators in YALE has grown tremendously and the architecture and implementation of YALE was significantly re-designed and improved to address the needs of its growing user base. Prof. Dr. Katharina Morik, head of the Artificial Intelligence Unit at University of Dortmund, where the YALE project started in 2001, will continue to support this project with her expertise in Data Mining as the first member of the scientific advisory board of RAPID-I. She is an internationally renowned expert in machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery and was one of the founders of this field in Germany.

YALE is a rapid prototyping system for knowledge discovery and data mining. While the start-up Rapid-I ensures the maintenance of YALE and the support of its users, YALE will remain open-source (GPL). So, for end users of YALE, nothing changes: using YALE is free of charge. For developers of closed-source software who would like to integrate YALE into their products, there now is the option of acquiring a developer license (OEM) for YALE and using it as a powerful library to enhance their products with learnability, adaptability, and innovative analytical features. In addition to this dual licensing, RAPID-I will continue the maintenance and further development of YALE as well as the support of its rapidly growing user base. For and beyond YALE, Rapid-I will also offer services like consulting, professional support, customization, and integration.

YALE is the technologically leading and with more than 400 data mining operators most comprehensive open-source data mining software world-wide. It is widely used by a large number of organizations covering a wide range of different branches. Today, thousands of applications of YALE in more than 30 countries give their users a competitive edge. Rapid-I now further improves the quality of YALE and will help to spread the benefits of data mining and business intelligence for both open-source and professional users.

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