Wakelet: the story of a Manchester tech start-up

Wakelet, a tech-start up founded by Salford graduate Jamil Khalil, has secured £1 million in funding from UK and US investors. Founder Jamil Khalil writes for Northern Soul about why it was important to launch the social sharing platform in Manchester.

Manchester is home. It’s where we are from and it’s a great city with a lot of talent and potential. The start-up and tech scene is just starting to wake up, so this creates energy and opportunity. We want to be part of leading this wave of enterprise and innovation.

We want to be based in Manchester. A lot of people have told us to leave the UK and to go to other places but we want to make it happen here.

Countries, cities, universities and start-ups benefit from success stories. If Manchester wants success stories, we need to create the environment, support infrastructure and resources to support start-ups so they can grow to be successful.

If you look at the US, it is clear we are still a long way behind – they have a risk-taking culture. If you want to innovate and take huge leaps, you need to have an appetite for risk, and at times be willing to lose and learn.

So what is Wakelet? It’s a web application that lets people, businesses and academic institutions organise links to online information into neatly-presented collections called ‘wakes’.

In a world of information overload, big data and real-time streams, search engines work hard to index the ever-growing amount of online information. While search algorithms help us find isolated pieces of information faster, they don’t know which ones are most relevant to us as individuals. Wakelet brings a human touch to this process by giving us the ability to easily collect and organise anything we read, view or listen to in a way that’s useful to us and to others.

The Wakelet platform provides simple and intuitive tools that give users the ability to organise and curate links to articles, videos, images, documents and audio into easily maintainable collections called Wakes. Wakes can be created in minutes on any topic and can be made public, kept private, or shared with friends, family, colleagues or the wider web.

It’s really started to take off. We’ve attracted individual users, public organisations, sports teams and businesses. We are excited about building a successful business, one that is useful and is solving real problems  – with its birthplace in Manchester.

By Jamil Khalil

Wakelet was founded by former tech lead at Airbus, Jamil Khalil. It is supported by high profile backers and advisers, including the original publishers of Angry Birds, Chris Byatte and Joe Wee.