Streem acquired by US public relations firm Cision

Australian media monitoring company Streem is being bought by media and PR company Cision in a deal that will see the US firm gain 100 per cent of Streem’s shares.

Streem will keep its own branding and local staff through the acquisition. Its leadership team, including the company’s co-founders CEO Elgar Welch and CTO Antoine Sabourin, is also expected to stay on.

“With more than 100 local staff servicing over 400 leading clients, Streem has grown faster than we ever could have imagined thanks to great tech, strong support from customers and an incredible local team,” Welch said.

“Backed by Cision, we’ll continue to build upon that growth, delivering new tools and products to help communications teams work smarter.”

Cision CEO Abel Clark recognised Streem as the “preferred media intelligence platform” in Australia and New Zealand.

“Streem’s customers will benefit enormously from Cision’s global reach and we’re excited to be able to offer a full-suite of monitoring, distribution, insights and social media solutions in ANZ that both our local and global customers can benefit from,” he added.

Welch and Sabourin planted the seeds of Streem in 2013 as they looked to re-invent media monitoring for the digital age.

Four years later it reached the market and quickly caught the attention of major Australian brands like Telstra, Qantas, and the AFL who jumped on its realtime broadcast monitoring services and local support teams.

Streem recently picked up a competitive edge through an exclusive licensing deal with Sky News that came into effect in September.

Once the deal is finalised – and cleared by the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board and US Department of Justice – it will see Streem absorbed into Cision’s global operation which boasts nearly 5,000 staff across 24 countries.

It’s a change that Sabourin said will bring “major benefits for customers” as Cision’s cash will allow Streem to “keep investing in great people, tech and innovation”.

But it also marks another Australian media monitoring firm being swallowed up by a bigger US company following Access Intelligence’s acquisition of iSentia, at a value of $67 million, in June.

Meltwater, another big player in the local market, is run out of Norway.

Former iSentia CEO John Croll started his own realtime media analysis company Truescope in 2020, opening offices in both Singapore and Australia.