Meltwater Acquires Swedish Image and Object Recognition Company, OculusAI, to Strengthen Engineering Talent and Enhance Online Intelligence Solutions

SAN FRANCISCO, March 26, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Meltwater, a leading provider of online intelligence solutions, today announced the acquisition of OculusAI, a leader in state-of-the-art image and object recognition technology. Together the companies enhance Meltwater's offerings in social media marketing, helping companies drive growth and improve productivity through a deeper understanding of their customers, markets and social business communities.OculusAI's engineering team will be joining Meltwater.

Meltwater has grown to a $130 million company by delivering online intelligence solutions in the online media and social media monitoring space. The company has 57 offices around the world serving more than 20,000 customers. OculusAI is a leader in machine learning and image processing. OcculusAI's prior successful projects include automated scanning of on-line images in news content to locate brand identifiers (logos). In addition to their background in machine learning, the team has demonstrated a strong ability to build products and bring them to market. Moving forward, the OculusAI team will be leading the development of Meltwater's newest division, Insight Products, using big data to provide meaningful insights from data outside the firewall.

Meltwater has acquired all of the IP and assets of OculusAI. In addition, the technical team members of OculusAI will join the Meltwater engineering team and establish a new, permanent engineering presence in Meltwater's flagship Stockholm office.

"The technology and Intellectual Properties of OculusAI are relevant to the future expansion of Meltwater's unique capabilities to process content and glean meaningful insights from data outside the firewall," says James St. Jean, Executive Director of Engineering at Meltwater, "We wanted to acquire an established development team that was ready and able to tackle some of the new product initiatives that lie ahead on the 2013 roadmap."

Two of the key leaders from OculusAI joining Meltwater are Fredrik Widlund, Head of Engineering for OculusAI and Dr. Babak Rasolzadeh, CTO and founder of OculusAI. Fredrik Widlund will lead the new team in Stockholm as Director of New Insight Solutions and Dr. Rasolzadeh, recently featured in Veckans Affärers 2013 Top 100 super talents list, will be joining Meltwater early this summer in a new engineering role focused on solution design, integration, and innovation.

"The OculusAI tech team is very excited and happy about joining the Meltwater family. The talented PhD's and engineers of OculusAI have over the years developed several exciting and cool applications within the domain of computer vision and machine learning," says Dr. Rasolzadeh, CTO of OculusAI, "By joining the Meltwater family, we hope our expertise within the broader field of artificial intelligence can play a key role in Meltwater's vision of becoming a leading player in the big data and social data mining market. We look forward to helping forge this vision and realizing it."

About OculusAI

OculusAI is a Computer Vision company that develops state-of-the-art image & object recognition technology that enable automated content recognition, moderation and analysis for developers worldwide. To this end they've developed a portfolio of various computer vision technologies such as: face detection & classification, large scale image retrieval, logotype recognition, ad recognition and categorization, adult image classification and mobile product recognition.  The company was founded in 2008 and is sprung out of research from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. Today, the company has clients throughout the U.S. and Europe. OculusAI has been recognized with several prestigious awards as one of the hottest startups in Scandinavia and throughout Europe.

About Meltwater

Meltwater helps businesses drive growth and build brands. Meltwater's online intelligence platform analyzes billions of digital documents daily to extract precise, timely business insights that help more than 20,000 companies understand their markets, engage their customers, and master the new social business environment. With offices in 27 countries, Meltwater is dedicated to personal, global service built on local expertise. http://www.meltwater.com