Meltwater is a software as a service (SaaS) solution and the world's first online media monitoring company. It is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (Oslo Børs) (ticker code: MWTR). The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, by Jørn Lyseggen, in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional offices across Europe, North America, Asia/Pacific, Australia, and Africa. The company employs around 2,200 people and has approximately 27,000 clients internationally. The Meltwater Foundation, the non-profit arm of the company, started Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. MEST is a Pan-African training program, seed fund and incubator, founded by Jorn Lyseggen in 2008, to provide training, investment, and mentoring for aspiring technology entrepreneurs with the goal of creating globally successful companies that create wealth and jobs locally in Africa. History The company was founded in 2001 as Magenta News by Jørn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen. The company's first product was a news clipping service that scanned 100,000 news sources to collect keywords of relevance to its business customers. The pair bootstrapped the company with US$15,000. In 2005, the company relocated its headquarters to San Francisco and changed its name to Meltwater News. In 2008, through the company's non-profit arm, the Meltwater Foundation, Lyseggen launched the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology in Accra, Ghana to provide entrepreneurial, software and business training to its Entrepreneurs in Training (EITs). In 2010, the company announced the release of Meltwater Press, a web-based media contact database that uses natural language processing technology to connect journalists with their most relevant covered topics. After the acquisitions of the Bangalore-based social media monitoring company, BuzzGain in 2010, and the CRM software developer JitterJam in February 2011, Meltwater released the social marketing and business intelligence tool Buzz Engage in June 2011. In August 2011, the company acquired the real-time social search engine, IceRocket, and integrated its functionality into its rebranded Buzz Engage platform, Meltwater Buzz. In 2015, the company launched a new media intelligence platform, called "Meltwater". In March 2016, Meltwater acquired the analytics startup, Encore Alert, and integrated its functionality into its Smart Alert product offering. In early 2017, Meltwater acquired Wrapidity, an Oxford University spin-out, to add AI to media monitoring capabilities automating extraction of data from unstructured web-based content. That same year, the company acquired the Hong Kong-based big data company Klarity, the media monitoring arm of the Postmedia Network, Infomart, the