Meltwater, a global leader in media intelligence solutions, announced it has closed a $60M debt funding round with Silicon Valley Bank, and Vector Capital in order to ramp up strategic acquisitions.
The announcement comes as Meltwater is seeing significant organic growth across all markets. Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jorn Lyseggen recognises the opportunity for a number of acquisitions in various markets moving forward that will fuel both organic and inorganic growth.
“We see acquisitions as an integral part of our growth strategy,” Lyseggen said. “We believe in the next 24 months we will see high M&A activity in our space, and we raised this capital to give us the firepower to take an active role in these processes.”
Since 2009, Meltwater has acquired 9 companies, including the recently announced Encore HQ, a 500 Startups Alumna known for their social media alerts powered by data science. “We are primarily looking for proven technology in data science, machine learning and natural language processing,” Lyseggen said. “We will also look at companies with a dominant position in a particular market or vertical.”
“Closing this credit facility with Tier 1 lending institutions such as Silicon Valley Bank and Vector Capital is a great vote of confidence in Meltwater,” said Martin Hernandez, chief financial officer (CFO) at Meltwater. “As we look to further expand our already significant global footprint, we believe we’ve found great partners to work with that can help us fund organic growth as well as continue our acquisition strategy.”
“We are delighted to partner with Meltwater in support of their continued growth and success,” said Alex Slusky, Vector’s founder and chief investment officer (CIO). “We enthusiastically support their vision to create and define the market for Outside Insight – where business signals from vast arrays of external data on the Internet can be captured and transformed into actionable and valuable insights for executives and operating teams.”
