Brian Pontarelli is the founder of Boulder based Inversoft. The company makes profanity filtering services which can be accessed via an web based API or installed on-site and referenced as a database. The purpose, of course, is to allow the prevention or filtering of profanity or other “bad words” in user generated content. We of course have no use for this, but you can imagine that someone like Disney or Kerpoof just might.
What a fun job this must be, sitting around the office and keeping up with the latest cuss words in order to update the database. Brian must know all the cool new words.
Inversoft has landed a few interesting customers such as Intuit, as well as some design shops that are building solutions for their own customers.
This problem space is trickier than it might sound at first. For example, you might assume that a sentence referencing an animal called an peacock (like this one) might be incorrectly filtered. It gets even trickier when malicious a$$holes use every f*cking s h i t t y trick in the book to break the rules. Inversoft products have sophisticated regular expression handlers for cases like these.
I think the market for the Inversoft profanity services is very niche, but very real. This could be a nice business for Brian, but I’m not sure how this goes turbo-big. I suspect we’ll see Inversoft branch out a bit if this first commercial product is a success. But congrats to Brian on making the jump with both feet!
Maybe Inversoft should sell one to Feld and one to Micah. Does it work as a blog plug in?
Inversoft is also involved in an open source web application framework project called J-Catapult which we first covered last month.
