Meltwater to Buy Linkfluence for EUR 50m

Social media analyst Meltwater is to acquire French company Linkfluence, which uses artificial intelligence to mine social media for consumer insights. The agreed price of EUR 50m comprises a combination of cash, equity and earn-out.

Linkfluence's solutions are used by brands to identify buyer communities online and understand how to activate them, to see how a brand is associated with certain topics or values in order to measure brand perception, to detect and monitor trends and to analyze customer experience. The firm's technology analyzes billions of public content pieces on social media, using natural language processing or computer vision, and structures this data into insights, available to its clients in real-time. The company is headquartered in Paris and has 150 employees across seven offices.

For the full year 2020, Linkfluence reported revenue of EUR 17m. Excluding earn-out, Meltwater has agreed to purchase Linkfluence for a price of twice 2020 revenue, to be settled 50% in cash and 50% in new shares to be issued by Meltwater at a volume weighted average price to be determined prior to closing. The Linkfluence acquisition will be Meltwater's ninth since 2016.

John Box (pictured), CEO of Meltwater, comments: 'We have been impressed with Linkfluence's pioneering work in using smart algorithms and social media to automate market research. By combining Linkfluence's solutions and expertise within market research and Meltwater's global reach with 50 sales offices on six continents, we will be well positioned to be the driving force of automating the multi-billion-dollar market research industry'.

Web sites: www.meltwater.com and www.linkfluence.com .