Manticore Search is a high performance open-source search engine platform that came out of the Sphinx open-source software project that ceased to exist by 2017. The founders of Manticore Search were Peter Zaitsev, former CEO of Percona, and Mindaugas Žukas, COO of Altinity. They took on the technology to commercialise it for various industry verticals, while keeping it open source.
The company is now interested in establishing channel partnerships, and is aiming to drive marketing to make the technology more visible to the market. It will also consider new funding from investors to support its wider efforts.
At this week’s IT Press Tour in Valletta, Malta, Manticore described its platform thus: Manticore Search is a modern, fast, lightweight, and fully-featured database with outstanding full-text search capabilities. It said its platform could “tackle the pain points” of data search and management, including slow queries, high resource consumption, scalability issues, complex queries, no SQL support, and setup and maintenance complications.
“We solve these issues. Tools are supposed to make things simpler, not more complicated,” said Sergey Nikolaev CEO and founder of Manticore.
He said Manticore Search was “easy to use”, offered an “intuitive setup”, and offered vector search, both MySQL and JSON support, data backup, as well as multi-modal storage (row-wise and columnar), and availability from GitHub.
In 2025, he added, the product would offer auto sharing, security authentication, integration with Kibana, and auto-embeddings for vector search. The company makes money through professional services around the open-source software, support subscriptions, and new features engineering. “We have monetization and SaaS plans going forward, and with the right partners we can take Manticore to the right level,” said Nikolaev.
“We have no real marketing, and are almost invisible to the market, although we do have a few hundred installations. New venture capital investment may well help improve our visibility.”
The channel is another focus for the vendor to increase product visibility, with specialist system integrators seen as “ideal” for the offering.
While Manticore is a company that is registered in the UK, with an office in Chatham, Kent, a number of its key personnel are located in Russia, as well as other countries, including Montenegro and Thailand. Asked whether the current geopolitical situation and the Russia connection may or not hinder investment, Nikolaev admitted it “may or not” be a consideration for some.
On perhaps being acquired, Nikolaev said: “If there was an interesting offer, we would have to consider it, but it would have to be put to our existing investors.”
