Meltwater acquires AI startup DeepReason.ai
Media intelligence platform Meltwater has entered an agreement to acquire artificial intelligence startup DeepReason.ai for US$7.3 million.
The announcement:
Meltwater B.V., a leading global SaaS provider of media intelligence and social analytics, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire artificial intelligence start-up DeepReason.ai, a spin-off from Oxford University’s computer science department, for $7.3m in a combination of cash and meltwater equity including earn-outs contingent on reaching technical milestones and retention requirements.
DeepReason.ai was established in 2018 and is one of the leading companies within the field of AI known as “reasoning”. Their unique technology is based on the Value Added Data Systems (VADA) research project, which was funded by UK research council EPSRC. This work represents 75 years of aggregate R&D experience, and is overseen by Georg Gottlob, Oxford professor and Fellow of the Royal Society.
Knowledge graphs are AI systems that connect data. Connected data, enriched with meaning, is foundational in getting answers to complex queries and deriving insights with more efficiency. DeepReason.ai has developed a powerful reasoning engine with an industry-first ability to maintain incremental views of knowledge graphs and has solved the costly challenge of updating and maintaining complex knowledge graphs at scale.
Today, Meltwater ingests and processes over 800 million documents a day, extracting new information on over 14 million companies, 50 million public personas (such as key decision makers within those companies and social media influencers) and 75 million topics. Every day, this knowledge graph expands by incorporating 2 billion connections to conversations around these companies, public personas, and topics.
“With the DeepReason.ai acquisition, Meltwater will be in a unique position to continue expanding this knowledge graph to discover even more connections and insights. For the last two decades, Meltwater’s proprietary search engine has powered the insights and analytics offered to our customers. Going forward, Meltwater’s reasoning engine will both simplify and advance the way that our customers generate insights in our product, with capabilities that extend beyond a traditional search engine,” said Meltwater CTO Aditya Jami.
“The acquisition of DeepReason.ai, and the integration of their reasoning engine, will allow our customers to make use of our product in new and innovative ways, gaining quick access to new types of insights that are not readily discoverable today. As our customers turn to Meltwater to help them better understand and analyse millions of documents every day, we continue to invest in our underlying technology and AI models to serve up sophisticated insights, in real-time, making our customers both more efficient, and better informed – enabling more strategic decision making,” said Meltwater CEO, John Box.
“We are proud to join Meltwater’s ambitious undertaking to build one of the world’s largest knowledge graphs of public information,” said Dr. Stéphane Reissfelder, CEO of DeepReason.ai. “This is the second AI spin-off from Oxford University that Meltwater has acquired, and we are excited about working for a company that appreciates academic research accomplishments and has the knowledge and skills to convert them into commercial applications.”
DeepReason.ai has five full-time and four part-time employees, of which seven hold PhD degrees, who will all join the Meltwater team. Upon integration, DeepReason.ai’s business is not expected to have a material impact on Meltwater’s 2021 revenue forecast. The DeepReason.ai acquisition will be Meltwater’s fourth acquisition since the company was listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020.
Source: Einsteinz media release
