A UNIVERSITY of Ulster spin-out, Sophia Search, has closed what it claims is the largest ever angel investment in a Northern Ireland company.

Sophia has declined to say how much it has raised but it is believed to be a “seven-figure sum in US dollars”.

Iona Technologies co-founder Chris Horn was one of the private individuals who took part in the round and has also been appointed chairman of Sophia.

David Patterson, co-founder and chief executive of Sophia, said Mr Horn’s knowledge of and contacts in the US market would be invaluable to the start-up which has developed a set of search tools to find documents within organisations.

Patterson said research from IDC found that the enterprise search market had grown by 18 per cent last year despite the global recession and the US accounted for the bulk of that growth.

“There’s a perception that the problems with search have been solved,” says Patterson. “But internally in organisations especially, people are frustrated trying to find information.”

Patterson began researching the whole area of research in 2004, when he was director of an artificial intelligence research and technology transfer centre at the University of Ulster which focused on data mining, machine learning and information retrieval. He collaborated with Dr Vladimir Dobrynin at St Petersburg State University and the two men subsequently founded Sophia.

It was spun out with funding from University of Ulster and Invest NI, the local business support agency. Within months it won the 25K award for start-ups which carries a £25,000 cash prize and last November it won Intertrade Ireland’s Seedcorn competition for high-growth firms.

Patterson explains that, unlike other search engines, Sophia incorporates semiotic linguistic theory so that it understands the context of a users search.

As a result it has improved informational retrieval but can also understand the links between documents which may not be apparent.

“We see our product being at the intersection of business intelligence, content management and search,” explained Patterson.

Sophia Search has already signed up a number of customers and has also entered into partnerships with other technology companies who will incorporate Sophia into their own products and services.

These include IBM, Accelrys, a specialist provider of business intelligence software to the life sciences sector, and search engine optimisation company Word Tracker.

The new investment is being used to expand the staff at Sophia, particularly in the areas of sales and technical development. The company currently employs 10 staff.