NewsWhip gets $1.1 million seed round to help you find breaking news

NewsWhip, whose news-finding dashboard “Spike” helps journalists identify news stories breaking on social networks, has raised a $1.1 million seed round.

The Dublin, Ireland-based company will be using the money to open a New York office, to reach new clients, and to upgrade its website and Android and iPhone apps.

The company tracks news stories along with hundreds of data points on how those stories are being shared online, enabling it to “map the genome of social distribution,” it says.

“With Spike, we’ve built a story-finding tool that makes life much easier every day for hundreds of journalists, editors, producers, and marketers” said co-founder and CEO Paul Quigley in a press release.

The team is small: Just seven full-time individuals work for the company in Dublin now, in Dogpatch Labs, a chain of coworking spaces run by Polaris Ventures. NewsWhip plans to hire two more people in New York: a communications officer, who will help with publishing data and insights from the company’s platform, and an account manager.

Despite its size, the company boasts that it has newsroom clients in 12 countries, as well as freelancers, small publishers, advertising agencies, and brands.

Quigley told VentureBeat that paying customers include the Huffington Post, BBC, the Blaze, Think Progress, News International, the Toronto Star, the Guardian, ABC, and Resource.

The investors include Hal Philipp of Meridian Growth Capital, Shane Naughton of Inundata, AIB Seed Capital Fund (managed by Dublin BIC), Enterprise Ireland, and angel investor and entrepreneur Hannes Smarason, the former CEO of Icelandair and CBO of deCODE.

The company previously scored an angel round with Hal Philip and Shane Naughton in 2012, for an undisclosed amount under $1 million.