Meltwater, a leading global provider of media intelligence and social analytics, has acquired Owler, a business information company. Meltwater paid for Owler $18.9 million in cash and $5.6 million in Meltwater equity.
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% of the Fortune 500, and 73% 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.
Meltwater wants to combine Owler’s crowdsourced information with the insights that Meltwater is able to extract from online news and social media. This is how the company plans to differentiate Meltwater’s product in the market.
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.
Earlier this year, Meltwater also acquired Linkfluence, a French SaaS company using artificial intelligence to algorithmically mine social media for consumer insights. The acquisitions are part of Meltwater’s growth strategy, which involves investments and acquisitions in the social media segment.
