Durlacher will today announce that KVault Software, a firm in which it owns a 66% stake, has been valued at £35.5m following a £5.5m fundraising.

KVault was founded by Durlacher in December last year to develop software that enables large companies to organise the vast amounts of emails, web pages and other unstructured electronic information that they receive each day and often have to store for long periods of time to comply with financial regulations.

The firm is based around a product called Enterprise Vault, which links to data held in Microsoft Exchange servers and was designed by Compaq. Durlacher bought the product and its designers from the US company at the end of last year for a small undisclosed sum.

Software industry executive Mike Hedger will today be appointed to head the new firm.

Researchers at Durlacher believe that the market for unstructured information management tools is worth more than $5bn (£3.3bn) and is growing at 40% per year.