Reading based digital archiving platform Arkivum secures £1.5M

Published by

Nicky Godding

A Reading based company which helps companies secure long-term access to their files and documents has secured more than £1.5 million in funding from Private equity investment firm Growthdeck alongside existing investors, IP Group and Parkwalk.

Files and documents stored for many years run the risk of becoming corrupted, damaged, lost or obsolete. Arkivum provides a specialist digital archiving and preservation service to customers in highly regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical. This cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) enables digital content to be safeguarded, accessible, usable, readable and auditable for decades into the future.

Arkivum’s software ensures comprehensive regulatory compliance, underpinned with a data guarantee, while being simple to use and deploy.

A major growth area for Arkivum is the archiving of clinical trial data for pharmaceutical companies, specifically the highly regulated Electronic Trial Master File (eTMF). Drug sponsors (the lead company for a drug development) have specific retention requirements around the eTMF with each file containing tens of thousands of different types of documents. For example, the European Medicine Agency (EMA) states that documentation must be retained and preserved for at least 25 years for any drug approved for sale in Europe.

Arkivum helps businesses ensure that the data they have collected remains accessible, secure and usable for decades into the future. It works with businesses, often in highly regulated industries, to deal with the data archiving problems that it says tech consultancy Forrester has described as a ‘ticking time-bomb’.

Many of the organisations Arkivum works with, such as pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs, are required by regulators to retain clinical trial data for 25 years. Failure to provide the right data when requested can lead to fines and trials coming to a halt.

Arkivum was borne out of a project at the University of Southampton in the UK, a world leader in data science and management.

Its founders realised there was a need to protect and preserve data forever, which at the time, there wasn’t a solution to. A frustrating problem for many and a problem that was continuing to increase in importance as more and more data was produced and technologies continued to evolve. A smart team of people worked out how to solve this problem and created Arkivum.

Allyson Clarke, Relationship Director at Growthdeck, said: “We’re excited to be backing a business that solves such a vitally important and growing issue – the preservation of data, now and in the future.”

“Many of our life-saving industries, such as pharmaceuticals and scientific exploration, rely heavily on keeping extremely valuable data records safe to allow them to complete their investigations. As a key provider to these vital services, Arkivum’s solutions outperform anything else currently on the market.”

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.