The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, by Jørn Lyseggen,[2] in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional offices across Europe, North America, Asia/Pacific, Australia, and Africa.

[10][11][12] 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.

[18][19] 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.

[3] In December 2020, Meltwater became the title partner for the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, an online chess tournament where the best players in the world compete in total of ten tournaments for a total prize pool of US$1.5 million.

As part of that partnership, Magnus Carlsen, the four-time World Chess Champion, became a global brand ambassador for Meltwater.

On March 21, 2013, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York rejected Meltwater's claims that its use of Web stories drawn from a scan of 162,000 news websites from more than 190 countries was a fair use of copyright-protected material, in a lawsuit brought by The Associated Press.

[37] In mid-March 2010, in an interim jurisdiction question the Copyright Tribunal ruled in favor of Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), with the NLA was ordered to pay the costs of the suit.

The rationale was that viewing of copyright works was not, and had never been, illegal in either the UK or European law,[40]: item 36  and Article 5.1 of the European Directive 2001/29/EC (which covers "temporary copies"[40]: item 9, 11 ) permitted automated copying of a temporary nature for a lawful purpose.