Many businesses and organizations have compiled voluminous backlogs of documents as unwieldy PDF files, and Tizra is putting the finishing touches on a product that essentially brings standard Web navigation features to such PDF archives.

Traditionally, a company or organization will spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reformat a large PDF library, said [Anne] Oren, Tizra’s chief marketing officer.

Though PDFs have made creating cross-compatible documents easier, dealing with PDFs, especially longer ones, is still a hassle -- for example, an entire 500 page PDF has to be completely downloaded just to glance at one page.

“Our tools split everything up into page-at-a-time delivery, and those pages can be packaged together as products of different sizes,” down to a single page, [David] Durand said.

The company is going to begin beta testing in February; its biggest tester is the American Diabetes Association with its $30 million publishing program.

Durand, Abe Dane, Francisco Rosa and Orens met while working at Ingenta, a publishing industry technology and services provider; the four left Ingenta together to form Tizra. Though Tizra has been self-financed for the past year, they have been working with the Slater Technology Fund for financing.

Durand, Rosa, Oren and Dane said they envision moving their company out of Durand’s attic and hiring a sales team of at least 15 within the next year. Their business plan forecasts the company could be worth more than $100 million, conservatively, and go public in five to seven years.