Meltwater (formerly known as Meltwater Group) is a publicly-traded company based in California, US. The company was originally founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001 as Magenta News. Today, the company has a worldwide business and employs more than 1,600 people. Meltwater mainly offers software as a service (SaaS) solutions and currently, it has more than 27,000 customers on a global scale spread across 120 countries. It has also built 50 offices in 20 countries in various parts of Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia, and North America. The company also has a non-profit division called The Meltwater Foundation and its project started in Accra, Ghana.
The Story Behind The Success
Meltwater was founded in 2001 by two legends, Jørn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen. They started the company as Magenta News and it was established in Oslo, Norway. When the two founders decided to open their business, all they had was a coffee machine and a capital of $15,000. Their first office was a very little space in a shipyard from where the team tried to create the first server farm. The company’s first target was to educate the Norwegian market to make their influence strong in the home country. The company educated its existing and potential audience regarding the value of tracking and monitoring online news. After struggling for a couple of years, the footprint of the company began growing in the mid-2000s.
Since Meltwater was the world’s first online media monitoring company, once it stabilized itself in the digital market it started growing rapidly. After establishing the company, it rolled out its first product which was a news clipping service. The product was capable of scanning 100,000 news sources at a single time for collecting keywords relevant to a business and its customers. In 2005, the company decided to shift its headquarters from Ohio to San Francisco and also changed the name of the company to Meltwater News.
Expansion
Amidst the rapid growth that the company was making, it decided to open a non-profit arm to offer business and educational support to the people of Africa. The Meltwater Foundation launched the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) to offer entrepreneurial training in Ghana. Within 2008, the company expanded to almost every continent and secured an impressive customer base in each one of them. In 2010, the company announced the release of Meltwater Press which was a web-based media contact database. The same year, Company acquired an Indian-based social media monitoring company, BuzzGain followed by a CRM software developer, JitterJam 2011. After these two successful acquisitions, Meltwater released an in-house social marketing and business intelligence tool called Buzz Engage. Meltwater made another acquisition in 2011 (IceRocket) to integrate its functionality with the Buzz Engage Platform.
In 2015, the company decided to launch a new media intelligence platform and named it Meltwater. For the next few years, Meltwater made several acquisitions and each of the company’s platforms was integrated with some of the existing Meltwater products to make them more flexible. In March 2016, the company acquired Encore Alert and in 2017 it acquired an Oxford University spin-out, Wrapidity. Later in 2017, Meltwater acquired a big data company called Klarity followed by Algo. In 2018 it acquired two companies, namely, Datasift and Sysomos. In 2020, Jørn Lyseggen stepped down as the CEO of the company and he was replaced by Niklas De Besche. But after a few months, he was made the COO of the company and John Box became the new CEO.
Jørn Lyseggen – Founder & Chairman of Meltwater
Jørn Lyseggen is a famous Norwegian entrepreneur who is currently the Executive Chairman of Meltwater and MEST. Lyseggen’s career started as a research scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center. Since he has a very entrepreneurial mindset, Lyseggen worked for different startups and also became the CEO of Mogul AS. The biggest highlight in his career was founding Magenta News (now known as Meltwater) and also a non-profit organization to boost the startup culture among Africans.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more