Meltwater acquires AI spin-out from Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science to help build one of the largest knowledge graphs of public information

Meltwater B.V., a leading global SaaS (‘Software as a service’) provider of media intelligence and social analytics, acquired AI start-up DeepReason.ai, a spin-out from Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science.

DeepReason.ai was founded in 2018 by Georg Gottlob, Emanuel Sallinger and Stéphane Reissfelder and is one of the leading knowledge graph reasoning providers. Knowledge graphs are AI systems that connect entities such as companies, people, products and topics to discover new connections and insights. DeepReason’s system can update and maintain complex knowledge graphs at scale and in real-time. The basic research underlying this system was led by Georg Gottlob, Oxford professor and fellow of the Royal Society, and carried out at Oxford in the context of project ‘VADA: Value Added Data Systems -- Principles and Architecture’ funded by the EPSRC research council.

Meltwater processes over 800 million documents every day and is each day growing its knowledge graph (consisting of 14 million companies, 50 million people, and 75 million topics) by approximately 2 billion connections to the conversations around those companies, people, 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.

‘In the last two decades, Meltwater’s proprietary search engine has been powering the insights and analytics offered to Meltwater’s clients. Going forward, Meltwater’s reasoning engine will unlock insights and customer value not possible to derive from traditional search engines capabilities,’ says Meltwater CTO Aditya Jami.

‘We are delighted to join Meltwater’s ambitious undertaking to build one of the world’s largest knowledge graphs of public information,’ says Stéphane Reissfelder, CEO of DeepReason.ai. ‘This is the second AI spin-out from Oxford University that Meltwater has acquired, and we are excited to join a company that values and invests in new technology based on academic research.’

Professor Leslie Ann Goldberg, the Head of Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science, said `The department is delighted by the deep and continuing impact of the research of Professor Gottlob’s team and we are very happy about the success of this spin-out from our department.’

Links to further information:

Meltwater: https://www.meltwater.com/en

University of Oxford: https://www.ox.ac.uk/

Oxford University Department of Computer Science: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/

VADA project:   http://vada.org.uk/project-description/   and https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/M025268/1