$1.5 Million Contract Funds Product Development and Investment in Convera

March 12, 2003
Vienna, VA

In-Q-Tel, a private venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Convera (Nasdaq: CNVR), a leading provider of search, retrieval and categorization software for enterprises and government agencies, today announced the signing of a development and investment agreement that will fund Convera in the development of key technologies and tools to help address the critical IT challenges facing the Intelligence Community. These products will be made available over the next six months and are broadly applicable to intelligence agencies as well as state and local governments implementing centers for homeland security.

In-Q-Tel will pay Convera $1,532,500 for the enhancements to its products. In conjunction with this transaction, In-Q-Tel will receive two-year warrants to purchase 137,711 shares of Convera common stock.

"We chose Convera because we see tremendous opportunities to leverage their RetrievalWare open platform for enterprise search, and ease and speed of integration that it offers. The ability to plug in multiple capabilities, including multimedia and third party applications, make Convera particularly attractive for supporting customization needs of the national security market," said Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel.

"The products being developed by Convera represent new source and search capabilities that are specifically suited for the Intelligence Community. We will make these products broadly available upon release," said Pat Condo, president and CEO of Convera.

Convera's search technology is currently used by more than 200 government customers around the world, including more than 75 intelligence and law enforcement-related installations. Customers include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (UK), German Tax Evasion Bureau (Saxony), Swedish National Criminal Intelligence Service, US Customs, US Department of Justice, US Department of Defense and US State Department.

About Convera
Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search, retrieval and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages. More than 800 customers in 33 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more. For more information, contact Convera at 800-788-7758, via e-mail at info@convera.com or on the Web at www.convera.com.