Posted: 29/11/2021
The corporate team at Penningtons Manches Cooper has advised the selling shareholders of Oxford spin-out DeepReason.ai on its acquisition by leading media intelligence SaaS provider Meltwater BV for $7.3 million in a combination of cash and Meltwater equity including earn-outs. The DeepReason.ai team will join Meltwater.
Penningtons Manches Cooper has acted for DeepReason.ai since advising on its spinout from the computer science department of Oxford University in 2018. The organisation has grown to become one of the leading names within the field of AI known as ‘reasoning’, having developed a knowledge graph platform that reveals AI-driven insights. Knowledge graphs are AI systems that connect data and can be used for data integration, unification, analytics and sharing.
Meltwater, which is listed on Euronext Growth Oslo, specialises in media intelligence and social analytics SaaS solutions and has become one of the most prominent acquirers of AI and data sciences companies in the world. Meltwater ingests and processes over 800 million documents a day and will use DeepReason.ai’s reasoning engine to maintain complex knowledge graphs, enabling the delivery of new types of insights to its global client base.
This is the second Meltwater acquisition of an AI spin-off from Oxford University on which the team has advised – having acted for the sellers on the sale of Wrapidity in 2017.
Corporate partner James Went led the Penningtons Manches Cooper team. He commented: “It’s always a pleasure to be involved in a successful exit for a client we’ve worked with from the very start. We’ve enjoyed working with the Deepreason team from the company’s establishment and look forward to seeing the contribution they will make to Meltwater.”
Deepreason.ai CEO, Stéphane Reissfelder said “I’d like to thank the Penningtons Manches Cooper team for their hard work and excellent support in completing this transaction. We’ve really valued the support they have given to Deepreason.ai over the years.”