three million pounds for shoreditch software pioneers

A Hackney company has won three million pounds from American investors to boost sales of a groundbreaking piece of software called SONAR, which will revolutionise the way in which businesses manage their information.

The deal is the first major investment in a new generation of business software, known as Enterprise 2, which has taken place anywhere in Europe.

Trampoline Systems, based in Old Aske’s Hospital, a former almshouse in Buttesland Street, Hoxton, has signed up to the deal with the Boston-based Tudor Investment Corporation, which specialises in new internet infrastructure and information technology companies.

Trampoline’s software transforms the way in which news, knowledge and ideas circulate and are used in businesses. The software uses the results of personal research into how small communities pass on new information – which Mr Armstrong carried out for twelve months in the Scilly Isles – to change the way in which emails, documents and data are distributed in large organisations.

“When I completed the research, I saw that most business software today works against the methods humans have evolved to distribute information,” says Mr Armstrong. “We have built the SONAR platform to support human instincts rather than disable them. It pinpoints centres of expertise, recognised and unrecognised, in a social network or organisation, and it relays new and incoming knowledge to where it is needed.”

“SONAR brings the statistical processing of natural language and social network analysis to the problem of browsing and filtering large archives,” chief technologist Craig McMillan explains. “We permit users to see who is talking to who, how much and about what. There are applications in areas including the discovery of expertise, compliance, forensics, searching and alerting.”

Trampoline was formed in 2003 with seed finance from funds and private investors in San Francisco, London and Tokyo. The company was helped in its recent search for funds by the Gateway to Investment service operating from the Innovatory on Old Street.

Over the last twelve months the business has gone from strength to strength. The SONAR system has been snapped up for use by the global defence and aerospace company Raytheon, as well as by the Foreign Office and Channel 4 Television. And in February Trampoline brought the Oracle UK Innovation Award back to Buttesland Street from a glitzy ceremony in Canary Wharf.

The company will be using the £3million investment to strengthen its sales activity, particularly in the United States, and to boost the company’s software development.

“It’s been an amazing experience coming from research on a remote island to being a successful technology start-up,” says chief executive Charles Armstrong. “The next stage of the journey is going to be even more exciting.”