Meltwater acquires Oxford University AI spinout Wrapidity

Meltwater recently announced the acquisition of Wrapidity Limited, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that originated from Oxford University.

Wrapidity uses breakthrough technology to automate data extraction from content on the web, and Meltwater hopes this will help to improve and scale its industry-leading analytics software and address the volume of data coming from new sources as required for future product generations.

According to Meltwater, they evaluated over 20 companies globally before determining Wrapidity to be the most apt choice, complemented by an experienced engineering team.

Founder and CEO of Meltwater, John Lyseggen says data science, machine learning and AI are all areas of strategic importance for Meltwater.

"Today, we are all drowning in unstructured data, and Meltwater is putting the whole weight of our company behind research efforts to unlock insights buried in the large amount of disparate data types found online," Lyseggen says.

"We are delighted that, despite stiff competition from a number of other suitors, we are able to bring Wrapidity and many years of research from Oxford University, one of the world's premier research institutions within AI, into the Meltwater family.

Professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and co-founder of Wrapidity, George Gottlob says instant access to products, places, people and news has changed our lives substantially over the last decade.

"The same access, but at a much larger scale, is now changing business in ways we can't even imagine yet," Gottlob says.

"At Wrapidity, we have responded to this by developing a completely new AI-based technology for extracting massive amounts of relevant data from millions of websites."

Lecturer at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and co-founder and CTO of Wrapidity, Tim Furche says that Meltwater already monitors and analyses millions of articles per day across several languages – combined with Wrapidity they will be able to surface more accurate, timely and insightful content.

"John and his team were visionaries in developing the software, services and business models to make such external web data usable for internal decision-making," Furche says.

"We truly believe that companies of the future will hinge on Outside Insight, and we're extremely excited to pursue this together."

Wrapidity joins a growing number of recent acquisitions for the media intelligence pioneer as it continues to ramp up its technological offerings globally, with a focus on data science.