Oxford spinout Wrapidity has been acquired by Meltwater for an undisclosed sum.

Wrapidity, an artificial intelligence (AI) spinout of Oxford University, was acquired today by data science company Meltwater for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2015, the spinout has developed technology that combines AI with big data and web technologies to automate data extraction from web content, creating a structured database to enable searches and analytics.

The technology will boost the capabilities of Meltwater’s own analytics software particularly as increasing amounts of data is produced online.

Meltwater identified Wrapidity for an acquisition following a process that evaluated more than 20 companies in the sector.

The spinout had raised £200,000 ($250,000) in funding, according to TechCrunch.

Georg Gottlob, co-founder of Wrapidity and professor at the Department of Computer Science, said: “Instant access to products, places, people and news has changed our lives in the last decade.

“The same access, but at a much larger scale, is now changing business in ways we cannot even imagine yet. At Wrapidity, we have responded to this by developing a completely new AI-based technology for extracting massive amounts of relevant data from millions of websites.”

Tim Furche, co-founder and chief technology officer of Wrapidity and lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, said: “Meltwater already monitors and analyses millions of articles per day across several languages.

“Combining Meltwater’s industry leadership and global footprint with Wrapidity’s advances in AI technology, we will be able to surface more accurate, timely and insightful content for Meltwater’s customers.

“Jorn [Lyseggen, founder and CEO of Meltwater] and his team were visionaries in developing the software, services and business models to make such external web data usable for internal decision-making. We truly believe that companies of the future will hinge on Outside Insight, and we are extremely excited to pursue this together.”