OSLO: Meltwater B.V., a leading global SaaS provider of media intelligence and social analytics, has entered into an agreement to acquire Klear, an Israeli SaaS company and a market leader in the fast-growing influencer marketing space.

 For the full year 2020, Klear reached revenues of $7.6 million. Excluding earn-out, Meltwater has agreed to purchase Klear for a price of 1.4 times 2020 revenue settled in cash at closing. The transaction is expected to close on or around April 14th, 2021.

 “The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a 10 billion-dollar industry growing 50 percent per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing,” says Meltwater CEO John Box.

Meltwater acquiring social media intelligence company Linkfluence for EUR 50 million

He continues: “Back in 2017, Meltwater partnered with Klear after doing a global search for the best product in this space. Together we have successfully won clients such as Nestlé, Walmart, OGILVY, Audi, H&M, BMW and Bvlgari. We can now fully combine Klear’s industry leading product with Meltwater’s global customer reach and create a formidable player to shape the future of the social influencer marketing space.”

 “At Klear, we use algorithms and artificial intelligence to help customers identify relevant influencers, manage influencer relationships, and measure the impact of those relationships – something that Meltwater has done for traditional media relations for many years. As the lines between media relations and influencer marketing continue to blur, and as a result of our successful partnership over the last four years, it makes perfect sense that we are formally joining forces,” says Eytan Avigdor, CEO of Klear.

Klear was founded in 2012 by three brothers Eytan, Noam and Guy Avigdor and is currently present in the US and the UK in addition to the headquarters in Israel.

Klear’s solutions can be integrated with contracting and payment solutions, along with ecommerce integrations with the likes of Shopify, allowing customers to manage their influencer marketing spend and see exactly how much revenue those influencers are driving for their brand, all in one place.

The Klear acquisition will be Meltwater’s second acquisition since the company was listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020 and its tenth since 2016. The acquisition is part of Meltwater’s growth strategy, which involves investments and acquisitions in the social media segment.

In March, Meltwater entered into an agreement under which it is committed to acquire Linkfluence, a company who uses artificial intelligence to extract consumer insights from social media.

 “With these two acquisitions, we open up two new markets worth $73 and $10 billion respectively. With our global presence and strong customer relationships, we expect to become a leader within both market research and influencer marketing. By integrating Klear functionality into the Meltwater product, we will have a truly unique offering in the market. Our social suite will provide social listening and analytics, social management and influencer marketing in one integrated product. This will also be the only product on the market that allows customers to conduct, execute and measure the effectiveness of both media relations and influencer relations in the same place.” says John Box.

Meltwater provides social and media intelligence. By examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs and news sites, Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions based on insight from the outside. The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with 50 offices across six continents. The company has 1,700 employees and 28,000 corporate customers, including industry leaders in several sectors. www.meltwater.com