Meltwater acquires Oxford University AI spin-off DeepReason

The acquisition has been valued at $7.3m, paid 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 operates within the field of AI known as “reasoning”. Its 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, the oldest national scientific institution in the world.

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", according to Meltwater.

Today, Meltwater ingests and processes over 800 million documents a day, extracting new information on more than 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 two billion connections to conversations around these companies, public personas and topics.

“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", said Meltwater chief executive John Box.

"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 in order to serve up sophisticated insights, in real-time, making our customers both more efficient, and better informed, [thereby] enabling more strategic decision making.”