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News this morning of another small British web start-up making it in the United States. Huddle, the online-workspace firm which I wrote about here a few months back, has just announced a new round of funding which will see it open up an office in San Francisco.

One of America's top venture-capital firms Matrix Partners has invested $10.2m in the start-up, which currently employs 42 people in its offices in Bermondsey in South London. Founded in 2007, Huddle has so far persuaded a wide range of companies and government departments to use its virtual workspaces where they can post documents, scrawl on whiteboards, and host meetings with their suppliers without ever leaving their desktop computers.

I caught up with the co-founder and CEO Alastair Mitchell who was naturally jubilant about the news. "Our ambition is to be the next Autonomy," he told me. To put that in context, Autonomy is the Cambridge-based company whose intelligent-search software business is a FTSE 100 member and made a profit of $232m last year; it is so focused on the United States that its figures are all in dollars.

Huddle has a long way to go before achieving that. After all, we don't even have any clear idea of whether it's making any money. "We don't talk revenues; we talk users," Mr Mitchell told me, though he did insist that the business was cash-flow positive. But what it does have in common with Autonomy is that it's a British-owned business taking an innovative idea to Silicon Valley, which is a welcome reversal of the normal trend.

One thing puzzles me. Why does a company whose entire sales pitch is that you can operate cheaply and effectively in cyberspace need to open an office in San Francisco to serve its American customers? Andy McLoughlin, Mr Mitchell's co-founder, is heading west to run the California operation and has this explanation: "Huddle makes it possible for people to connect and work with each other regardless of their location. However, for us as a company it's crucial to be closer to the people who use our product."

And that highlights an interesting fact about the web, which was meant to have brought the death of distance and to have made the location of a business irrelevant. Human contact still matters - and that's why so many web businesses still feel the need to be in or near Silicon Valley, where the most powerful humans in venture capital are located.

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