Meltwater B.V., a leading global SaaS provider of media intelligence and social analytics, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire crowd-sourcing company Owler, a Silicon Valley innovator in the $30 billion market for business information.

Since its inception in 2011, Owler has grown its user base exponentially to become the second largest online business community in the world, next to LinkedIn. The Owler community consists of 5 million active business professionals who contribute up-to-date business information to Owler’s 14 million company profiles. Owler members include 96 per cent of the Fortune 500, and 73 per cent of high growth companies in the USA. Each month, members contribute hundreds of thousands of insights not known to the public with topics ranging from private company revenue estimates, strength of competitors, CEO approval ratings, employee headcount, growth trends, corporate hierarchy, rate of innovation, diversity, culture, employee trust, and more.

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“Over the last 10 years, Owler has built one of the world’s most valuable online business communities,” said John Box, CEO of Meltwater. “Owler crowdsources information that would otherwise be impossible to find. Combining this proprietary information from Owler with the insights that Meltwater is able to extract from online news and social media will differentiate Meltwater’s product in the market and bring great value to our 27,000 customers globally. It not only strengthens our offering in use cases we serve today, such as brand management and competitive intelligence, but opens up new and exciting opportunities in areas such as sales intelligence and risk management, where Owler is already present.”

Meltwater has agreed to purchase Owler for $18.9 million in cash and $5.6 million in Meltwater equity. Upon integration, the Owler business is not expected to have a material impact on Meltwater’s 2021 revenue forecast.

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“We could not have found a better home than Meltwater. Owler helps companies and individuals access business critical information to prospect new sales leads, and to track the latest news about the companies that matter to them – all use cases that Meltwater understands deeply. Our combined data repository will be the most comprehensive in the industry, and by joining Meltwater’s artificial intelligence expertise with Owler’s community and crowdsourcing capabilities, Meltwater’s global customer base will unlock new markets and new opportunities to combine business information with news and social media content from around the world,” said Tim Harsch, Co-Founder and CEO of Owler.

Owler was founded by Harsch and Jim Fowler in 2011, who were pioneers in the data-as-a software space, selling Jigsaw, Fowler’s first company, to Salesforce in 2010. The Owler Executive team and all staff will join Meltwater once the acquisition is complete.

The Owler acquisition will be Meltwater’s third acquisition since the company was listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020. The acquisition is part of Meltwater’s growth strategy, which involves investments and acquisitions in the social media segment.

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