Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund Grants MirrorWeb £1 Million

Manchester-based MirrorWeb has received £1 million in funding from the first round of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.

The Northern Powerhouse Fund aims to foster growth and investment in the North of England. The fund is drawn from an array of sources such as The UK Government, EU Investment Bank and the British Business Bank.

Cloud-native web and social media archiving startup MirrorWeb will now work with Maven Capital Partners to expand their company within the Northern region.

Jeremy Thompson investment manager of Maven Capital commenting in the release that: “MirrorWeb has developed innovative technology which has allowed the firm to build a cloud-based website and social-media archiving service.”

MirrorWeb Co-Founders Karl Stringer, David Clee & Philip Clegg

In an emailed statement MirrorWebs CEO David Clee commented: “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,” he added.

Expansion

The company is expanding quickly having recently gone from five employees to 19 within the last three months. A portion of the new influx of funding will be used to hire 12 people to work on product and market development.

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MirrorWeb has undertaken a number of government contracts, the most significant was the archiving of the UK Government’s Web Archive. A process that involved moving 120TB of data to the AWS cloud.

To do so, it spun up a rewrite of Hadoop for the cloud, ultimately managing to index 1.4 billion documents in 10 hours – averaging around 146 million documents per hour.

They then built a search interface allowing users to browser 22 years’ worth of government archives .

Ken Cooper Managing Director at British Business Bank added in a release: “The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund continues to unlock growth for businesses across the region, creating jobs and providing the resource to develop innovative products and enter new markets.

“We are pleased that NPIF investment is supporting MirrorWeb’s ambitious objectives,” he added.