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Meltwater joins Nairobi Garage
Meltwater a software as a service (SaaS) company that develops and markets media monitoring and business intelligence software has joined Nairobi Garage.
Situated at our Kilimani Office Space, the company develops software that combines the power of AI with the largest news and social media database in the industry, to bring clients advanced Media Monitoring, Social Media Listening, Social Media Management, PR Analytics and Influencer Engagement tools.
The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, by Jørn Lyseggen, in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional offices across Europe, North America, Asia/Pacific, Australia, and Africa.
Meltwater started off as Magenta News. 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 (EITs).
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,” as a unified solution to solve marketing and business problems with the insights derived from the billions of online conversations and documents living outside company firewalls.
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.
With a presence in over 55 countries, to date the company has employed more than 1,500 people and has more than 25,000 clients internationally.
The Meltwater Foundation, a non-profit branch of the company, provides entrepreneurial and software training to promising young African students at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) who also recently joined us.
Meltwater now joins companies like Carlsberg, world’s leading brewer, Trama TecnoAmbiental (TTA), World’s largest solar providers, mdundo.com, Geopoll, LC Waikiki and Opera Software who are also part of Nairobi Garage business network.
Want to join our growing business network? Book a tour today at any of o]’ur branches and check out our amazing packages!
