Meltwater Buys Oxford Uni Spin-off DeepReason

US-based social media intelligence and analytics specialist Meltwater has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence start-up DeepReason.ai for $7.3m in cash and equity.

DeepReason.ai, which is a spin-off from Oxford University's computer science department, has developed a knowledge graph platform that connects data to uncover AI-driven insights at scale and in real-time. Its technology is based on the Value Added Data Systems (VADA) research project, which was funded by UK research council EPSRC, and represents 75 years of aggregate R&D experience.

Following the takeover, the company will join Meltwater, which ingests and processes more than 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. As part of the deal, DeepReason.ai's five full-time and four part-time employees, including CEO Stéphane Reissfelder, will join Meltwater. The acquisition will be Meltwater's fourth since the company was listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020, including Oxford University data extraction spinout Wrapidity, and more recently, French company Linkfluence, which uses artificial intelligence to mine social media for consumer insights.

Meltwater CEO, John Box (pictured), comments: 'The acquisition of DeepReason.ai, and the integration of the firm's 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 analyze millions of documents every day, we continue to invest in our underlying technology and AI models in order to serve up sophisticated insights, in real-time.'

Web sites: www.meltwater.com and www.deepreason.ai .