ScraperWiki secures further investment

ScraperWiki, the Liverpool Science Park-based outfit that enables people to write codes that trawl through public sites for data, has secured private equity backing from the North West Fund.

The investment has been made by venture capital firm EV which looks after £30m of the £185m European Investment Bank-backed fund, rather than AXM which handles a £15m pot aimed at digital and creative businesses.

The scale of EV's investment, and that of its stake in the business, was not disclosed. It typically invests between £50,000 and £2m.

ScraperWiki said the deal meant it had received investment of around £600,000 so far. In 2010 it was backed by Channel 4, and last June it won a £175,000 grant from the Florida-based Knight Foundation to expand its activities in the US and improve the service as a platform for journalists.

It has already worked with The Guardian and Channel 4's Dispatches on major investigations.

The business was founded by Aidan McGuire and Julian Todd and is led by Francis Irving.

Irving is closely associated with freedom of information and was previously involved in establishing Theyworkforyou.com which collates MPs voting records and other Parliamentary information.

To coincide with the investment, the company has appointed Jane Silber as chairman. She is chief executive of London-based Canonical whose product Ubuntu is an open source platform for cloud computing.

In a statement Irving said: “The market for business data will be fully disrupted over the next decade and we will be using this investment to drive up data accessibility and drive down data the cost and effort involved in accessing the data.”

EV investment director Doug Stellman said: “Usage of ScraperWiki is set to take off as awareness of the platform spreads. In addition to the corporate and government customers, ScraperWiki has growing a community of independent IT professionals who are using it to provide data analysis services to their customers. There have already been some fascinating examples of novel collaborations.”

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