$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, visit www.convera.com.