Manchester tech firm MirrorWeb has secured £1m of funding in its first round from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, led by Maven Capital Partners. The cloud-native web and social media archiving company has been valued at £7m due to its rapid-growth potential.
MirrorWeb’s headcount has gone from five to 19 in the past three months and the capital investment will help fund a further twelve people to enhance product and market development by the end of 2018.
MirrorWeb has developed an innovative, robust and highly scalable Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that enables frequent archiving of web and social media assets for businesses in the private, and public sector.
In the last two years, the firm has amassed clients from some of the UK’s largest corporations and high-profile public bodies including UK Parliament, Welsh Government, BBC, The Bank of England, HM Treasury and House of Lords. In May 2018, it announced its contract win with The National Archives, archiving and indexing the UK central Government’s online presence from 1996 to the present. The gigantic 120TB web archive encompasses billions of web pages and is the world’s largest digital archive.
MirrorWeb Managing Director David Clee, said: “In the future, we should have a definitive understanding of what the digital world was like in real time so we can continue to learn from the past by preserving the communication channels of the here and now.
We have already missed vast quantities of digital content. We founded MirrorWeb in 2012 to allow users to create permanent, unalterable records of all online communications, be that a website or social media platform. We now capture information of commercial, cultural and historical value curating it in a user friendly format so it will never be lost and will be accessible to future generations.”
“We’ve grown exponentially since that initial idea and this investment is another benchmark moment in our evolution that will support MirrorWeb’s ambition to lead the preservation of the world’s digital heritage.”
The company has developed a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), an on-demand cloud-computing platform that allows MirrorWeb’s unique software to linearly scale the infrastructure automatically, which gives the firm an unparalleled capacity for moving and archiving data at high speed cost effectively.
Jeremy Thompson, Investment Manager of Maven Capital, said: “MirrorWeb has developed innovative technology which has allowed the firm to build a cloud-based website and social-media archiving service. The team has already won some impressive customers including The National Archives and UK Parliament, and has developed a strong relationship with Amazon Web Services to enable the platform to scale up very easily. This investment will further strengthen the team in Manchester, as MirrorWeb looks to take advantage of growing demand as businesses and public sector bodies are increasingly looking for support to manage and monitor their digital communications.”
MirrorWeb was founded in 2012 by David Clee, Philip Clegg and Karl Stringer who combine five decades worth of experience in IT, web, software development and entrepreneurship.
The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund project is supported financially by the European Union using funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020 and the European Investment Bank.
