A Dutch provider of media intelligence and social analytics has snapped up Oxford spinout DeepReason.ai.
Meltwater, listed on the Euronext growth index in Oslo, Norway, could pay up to £5.5 million in a combination of cash and equity including earn-outs contingent on reaching technical milestones and retention requirements.
DeepReason.ai, spun out of the university’s computer science department, was established in 2018. Its artificial intelligence-based ‘reasoning’ technology is based on the Value Added Data Systems (VADA) research project, which was funded by UK research council EPSRC.
Knowledge graphs are AI systems that connect data. DeepReason.ai says its reasoning engine has 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.
Meltwater ingests and processes over 800 million documents a day, extracting new information on over 14m companies, 50m public personas and 75m 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,” said Meltwater CTO Aditya Jami.
“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.”
Dr. Stéphane Reissfelder, CEO of DeepReason.ai, added: “We are proud to join Meltwater’s ambitious undertaking to build one of the world’s largest knowledge graphs of public information.
“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.