Dave Copps, whose Brainspace Corp. has taken off in the “machine learning and artificial intelligence” market, wanted to order in turkey sandwiches and fruit from The Egg & I rather than meet me at some restaurant for lunch. That made sense. The founder of the fast-growing, 52-employee software company was in the final stages of overseeing a move into the firm’s new offices in Addison, after all, and he needed to be there for the troops.
The new space is larger than the company’s former digs in the old Dallas Observer building on Commerce Street in downtown Dallas. It’s also more cutting-edge, with blue-glass whiteboards, multiple “teaming” rooms, and a single, 112-foot-long wooden desk where the company’s three development teams will work.
The long plywood desk is broken up by three artistic, Swedish-made wooden “trees” that look a little like human brains, if you squint hard enough. “We wanted to create an open, collaborative environment,” Copps says enthusiastically. (He says most things enthusiastically, come to think of it.) “One with a lot of emphasis on innovation.”“My developers said, ‘are you crazy?’ when we won.”
Dave Copps
Why Addison, though—a town that’s generally considered less “hip” than central Dallas, where Copps helped pioneer the co-working movement several years ago? In addition to “loving the Addison Circle area,” Copps explains, “our employees are in their 20s and 30s, with young families, and most of them live north, in Plano and Frisco. This location will help them save time and money on their commutes.”
Economics and innovation are both important at Copps’ 8-year-old company these days, as it adds an emphasis on marketing its products to its longtime focus on development. Brainspace is a leader in what’s called “post-search technology,” because its unique software is able to quickly search big data by concepts rather than just keywords, as Google does. That’s enormously valuable to companies seeking to “get value out of their data, to turn it into an asset,” Copps says. “We’re the first to give companies the ability to turn their documents into a brain that everyone can use.” Current clients include the likes of General Electric, Deloitte, KPMG, Pioneer Natural Resources, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Digging into lunch at his desk—he has his own office, but the door is always open, he stresses—the tall (6-feet-2-inches), bearded Copps, who’s 53, recalls growing up in Dallas, where his father was an ophthalmologist, his mother an active community leader. He majored in industrial anthropology and minored in business at the University of North Texas, became a serial software entrepreneur, and, in 2006, sold a “semantic search” company for $32 million. That helped launch Brainspace, which scored its first major coup—winning a lucrative contract with LexisNexis—when it had just four employees, $100,000 in annual revenue, and software that wasn’t quite cooked yet.
“My developers said, ‘Are you crazy?’ when we won,” Copps recalls, smiling. “But part of being an entrepreneur is, you’ve got to have blind faith. I had faith that we could do it, but it was completely unreasonable.”
Today the machine learning and artificial intelligence market is ready to boom, he says, and Brainspace is well-positioned to ramp up its already rapid growth. It expected to triple new bookings last year over 2014, and anticipates growing 180 percent in 2016. There’s no resting on the company’s laurels, though. “Instead of pushing the rock up the hill, we have people coming to us now,” Copps says. “But we have to prevent stasis. We want to always be innovating, always pushing the market.” Then he adds, with that characteristic enthusiasm: “This company could literally go to the moon.”
