DURHAM – In the midst of social media chaos, from Facebook to Twitter, and growing needs for governments, businesses and other organizations to create a record of tweets to blogs, startup ArchiveSocial is bringing order – and now has a huge investor.

The Durham startup has been offering an archiving solution since 2011 with a steady stream of customers signing on. Among them, the Obama Administration. And investors noticed.

On Wednesday, ArchiveSocial disclosed that it had raised $53 million in investment capital from private equity firm Level Equity, which has offices in San Francisco and New York. and has some $1.7 billion under management.

The amount is huge, given that ArchiveSocial had previously raised only $2.1 million from investors, according to Crunchbase. But the company has generate plenty of other news, from landing the Obama social archive in 2017 to securing a $100,000 investment from AOL founder Steve Case in a startup competition. And serial investor David Gardner, head of Cofounders Capital, believed in the ArchiveSocial mission, investing early on as an angel backer. In 2014, a $1 million investment came in from the West Coast.

Fast forward to Wednesday – and how social media’s use has exploded in the past five years.

The mission

In defining ArchiveSocial, Crunchbase spells out the company’s appeal as battles continue over “fake news” and demands for more transparency as well as accountability. Customer response has been strong for the company, which says its customer base has doubled over the past 18 months.

The Crunchbase definition: “ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution for business compliance and legal protection. ArchiveSocial automates record keeping from networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is designed to address record keeping challenges for businesses in industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, government.”

Anil Chawla, the founder and CEO of the company, says the new funding will be used to further accelerate the company’s technology and growth.

“Social media has enabled an unprecedented level of transparency in government and is now the primary channel for public officials and agencies to communicate with the public,” Chawla said in announcing the funding.

“The ever-evolving nature of social media, however, also magnifies risk and the need for thorough and accurate record keeping. The investment and support from Level Equity strengthens our position as the market leader in social media archiving and allows us to further expand our best-in-class technology platform to support the growing needs of our current and future customers.”

ArchiveSocial’s website is filled with case studies and testimonials from customers who have relied on its archiving solution to deal with a variety of challenges. Its mission is to provide customers with a solution that meets requirements for record keeping and to mitigate potential legal risks.

The archives

The company helps create a “public record” of activities, especially for agencies that might have to public records requests.

“In all 50 states social media is considered public record, and agencies have an obligation to comply with open records laws,” the firm notes on its website.

ArchiveSocial also recently unveiled what it calls “Web Snapshots,” which it describes as “an expansion to the core archiving platform which automatically captures visual snapshots and legal records of website content within a customer’s existing social media archive.”

“ArchiveSocial’s outstanding product and customer experience, paired with a ‘must have’ value proposition, provide strong opportunities for growth and expansion,” said Sarah Sommer, co-founder and partner at Level Equity, in the funding announcement. “We are very excited to partner with Anil and the ArchiveSocial team as they enter the next phase of growth and look forward to the company’s future.”

Read the full announcement online.