The company was founded in 2001 as Magenta News by Jørn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen. The company's first product was a news clipping service that scanned 100,000 news sources to collect keywords of relevance to its business customers. The pair bootstrapped the company with $15,000 USD. In 2005, the company relocated its headquarters to San Francisco and changed its name to Meltwater News. In 2008, through the company's non-profit arm, the Meltwater Foundation, Lyseggen launched the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology in Accra, Ghana to provide entrepreneurial, software and business training to its Entrepreneurs in Training. In 2010, the company announced the release of Meltwater Press, a web-based media contact database that uses natural language processing technology to connect journalists with their most relevant covered topics. After the acquisitions of the Bangalore-based social media monitoring company, BuzzGain in 2010, and the CRM software developer JitterJam in February 2011, Meltwater released the social marketing and business intelligence tool Buzz Engage in June 2011. In August 2011, the company acquired the real-time social search engine, IceRocket, and integrated its functionality into its rebranded Buzz Engage platform, Meltwater Buzz. In 2015, the company launched a new media intelligence platform, called "Meltwater". In March 2016, Meltwater acquired the analytics startup, Encore Alert, and integrated its functionality into its Smart Alert product offering. In early 2017, Meltwater acquired Wrapidity, an Oxford University spin-out, to add AI to media monitoring capabilities automating extraction of data from unstructured web-based content. That same year, the company acquired the Hong Kong-based big data company Klarity, the media monitoring arm of the Postmedia Network, Infomart, the media monitoring company, Encore Alerts, and the data analysis startup, Cosmify. In August 2017, Meltwater acquired Algo in combination of cash and stock. In March 2018, Meltwater acquired DataSift. In April 2018, Meltwater acquired Sysomos.
Litigation
Meltwater has been involved in legal proceedings surrounding the legality of temporary copies and its online media clipping service. It was ruled unlawful in the United States under the "fair use" doctrine and lawful in the UK.
On March 21, 2013, U.S. District JudgeDenise Cote of the Southern District of New York rejected Meltwater's claims that its use of Web stories drawn from a scan of 162,000 news websites from more than 190 countries was a fair use of copyright-protected material, in a lawsuit brought by The Associated Press. All claims and counterclaims were dismissed in July 2013.
In the UK
The case revolved around whether a client lacking a license would infringe copyright by being shown, and viewing, the extracts from copyrighted material in this way. and was due to be heard in February 2011. In mid-March 2010, in an interim jurisdiction question the Copyright Tribunal ruled in favor of Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association, with the NLA was ordered to pay the costs of the suit. However, on July 27, 2011, Meltwater lost upon appeal in the UK High Court. The decision was reversed in 2013 by the UK Supreme Court, which ruled Meltwater's activities legal—subject to certain questions referred to the European Court of Justice intended to clarify matters of a cross-border nature. The rationale was that viewing of copyright works was not, and had never been, illegal in either the UK or European law, and Article 5.1 of the European Directive 2001/29/EC permitted automated copying of a temporary nature for a lawful purpose. As mere viewing by Meltwater's clients was lawful under UK and EU law, the technical automated creation of temporary copies to enable and facilitate this were also lawful.
