Meshfire , an artificial intelligence-backed social media management company based in Kirkland, Wash., will shut down Sept. 30. Meshfire  CEO Eli Israel penned a blog post announcing the closure, saying that the company has not grown enough to continue. Five years ago, we set out to change the way that people use Twitter with artificial intelligence to help you find the people, conversations, and opportunities that get lost in the flood of activity. We’re proud of what we’ve built and the grateful for the wonderful supporters we’ve gained along the way, but in the time since we started, Meshfire has not found the growth it needs to survive. Because of that, today we must sadly announce that the Meshfire service will shut down effective September 30, 2017. The company was founded by Israel,  Amber Osborne , Michael Templeman  and  Josh Sin . At the moment the team is made up of Israel, Osborne and Templeton. Israel characterized the team in an email as a group of “noble, happy warriors through thick and thin,” who always stand by each other. Israel is talking to a number of Seattle firms about executive roles in software product development. Osborne is on her way to Doghead Simulations to be chief marketing officer of the Seattle virtual reality conferencing software company. Templeman is researching commercial applications for deep learning and social media. While the company is shutting down its service, Israel wrote that the team wants to find a new home for Meshfire’s technology. “We still firmly believe in the value of A.I.-assisted online interactions and we expect to see the category grow, particularly as machine learning technology gets pushed out to devices at the edge of the network,” Israel told GeekWire. Nat Levy is a staff reporter at Geekwire covering a variety of technology topics, including Microsoft, Amazon, tech startups, and the intersection of technology with real estate, courts and government. Contact him at nat@geekwire.com and follow him on Twitter at @natjlevy .

Social media AI startup Meshfire is closing, founders aim to find a new home for the technology

The smart way to approach mobile game influencers

April 22, 2015 --
Apr 22, 2015                    -         ( Newswire.com )
Meshfire, the only social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence, today announced that VB Insights has named Meshfire as a Best Bet in its 2015 'Social Media management: Tools, tactics and how to win' report. VentureBeat defines a social media management platform as a software platform that delivers 10 capabilities across three categories: automating the production of social output, allowing for mass consumption of social messages, and analyzing data from social networks. The full report is available from VentureBeat at http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/21/28-social-media-management-tools-rated-scored-and-reviewed-study/ . The report evaluated 28 different software vendors on five key indicators and placed Meshfire in the 'Best Bets,' ranking it #1 for small and mid-sized businesses, and #2 for mid-sized enterprises. We believe Meshfire landed as a 'Best Bet' because it is the only social media tool that actually makes users more effective, said Eli Israel, Meshfire's CEO and co-founder. Customers receive the immediate benefit of community engagement and happiness, as this extensive VentureBeat analysis shows. According to VentureBeat, In the future, our social media marketing tools will use predictive modeling and artificial intelligence. [...] Meshfire wins out on overall score, price, and features that you wont find elsewhere. For a small business that doesnt understand when to engage, when to block a new follower, when to reply and how to leverage particular events or trends, Meshfire is invaluable. It is the only solution in our analysis that tells you what to do, not just what is happening. About VentureBeat
Founded in 2006, VentureBeat is the leading source for news and perspective on technology innovation. Their news, analysis, and events provide deep context to help executives, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts make smart decisions. VentureBeat aims to inform and inspire. Led by founder and CEO Matt Marshall, Editor-in-Chief Dylan Tweney, and a team of experienced journalists, VentureBeat covers a range of technology trends  from social to mobile, small business to enterprise, health tech, cloud, games, and more. About Meshfire
Meshfire is the only social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence. Spend less time managing social media and more time building valuable relationships and communities. See how Meshfire can help you by starting your free trial at www.meshfire.com . Meshfire is a trademark of Meshfire, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

VentureBeat names Meshfire a ’Best Bet’ among Social Media Management tools

Meshfire Ranked #1 and #2 for small- and mid-sized enterprises. April 22, 2015 --
KIRKLAND, Wash., April 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --Meshfire, the only social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence, today announced that VB Insights has named Meshfire as a "Best Bet" in its 2015 "Social Media management: Tools, tactics and how to win" report. VentureBeat defines a social media management platform as a software platform that delivers 10 capabilities across three categories: automating the production of social output, allowing for mass consumption of social messages, and analyzing data from social networks. The full report is available from VentureBeat at http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/21/28-social-media-management-tools-rated-scored-and-reviewed-study/ . Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150422/200685-INFO
The report evaluated 28 different software vendors on five key indicators and placed Meshfire in the "Best Bets," ranking it #1 for small and mid-sized businesses, and #2 for mid-sized enterprises. "We believe Meshfire landed as a 'Best Bet' because it is the only social media tool that actually makes users more effective," said Eli Israel, Meshfire's CEO and co-founder. "Customers receive the immediate benefit of community engagement and happiness, as this extensive VentureBeat analysis shows. "
According to VentureBeat, "In the future, our social media marketing tools will use predictive modeling and artificial intelligence. [...] Meshfire wins out on overall score, price, and features that you won't find elsewhere. For a small business that doesn't understand when to engage, when to block a new follower, when to reply and how to leverage particular events or trends, Meshfire is invaluable. It is the only solution in our analysis that tells you what to do, not just what is happening. "
About VentureBeat
Founded in 2006, VentureBeat is the leading source for news and perspective on technology innovation. Their news, analysis, and events provide deep context to help executives, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts make smart decisions. VentureBeat aims to inform and inspire. Led by founder and CEO Matt Marshall, Editor-in-Chief Dylan Tweney, and a team of experienced journalists, VentureBeat covers a range of technology trends  from social to mobile, small business to enterprise, health tech, cloud, games, and more. About Meshfire
Meshfire is the only social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence. Spend less time managing social media and more time building valuable relationships and communities. See how Meshfire can help you by starting your free trial at www.meshfire.com . Meshfire is a trademark of Meshfire, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. This content was issued through the press release service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com
To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/venturebeat-names-meshfire-a-best-bet-among-social-media-management-tools-300070506.html
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Seattle is known for many things. Coffee, Internet retailers, coffee, aircraft manufacturing, coffee, and a certain rather large software company. Plus, of course, one of the world’s most recognizable skylines, including the 600 foot-high Space Needle, which offers panoramic views of the city. So perhaps it makes sense that Seattle-based Meshfire offers a “helicopter view” of your social media account — plus a new feature the company is announcing today. Meshfire is part of a new breed of Twitter management tools. When you first take a look at the system, you’ll see your interactions, mentions, and suggestions laid out as cards on a dashboard. At first glance, it might remind you of to-do or project-management solutions like Asana or Trello, except that the cards in Meshfire are created automatically from your Twitter accounts. These suggestions are the product of one of the more interesting features of Meshfire: its “A.I. assistant,” called Ember. This suggests things for you to do — such as “follow this person,” “block this account,” and “engage with this message” — and can assign these tasks across your team to balance the workload. Automating this kind of engagement is, paradoxically, part of Meshfire’s mission to make social media human again. I asked the company’s founder and CEO, Eli Israel, how it works. We’re studying free-or-cheap marketing automation systems. Add your voice, and we’ll share the data with you . “It all came from conversations we were having about the tools that already existed for social media and how professionals were well represented, but for people that aren’t social media experts we noticed that things were lacking,” Israel told me. “TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Sprout Social and more offer great capabilities, but it is impossible — unless you know exactly what you are doing — to work out how to grow an audience, maintain it, and interact with your followers properly through using them.”
It was after those initial conversations that Eli and his team, including CMO Amber Osborne, began shaping up some ideas for a new social management tool. In a nutshell, Meshfire enables you to not just get notified of an activity on Twitter, such as when someone mentions you, but it automatically cleans out the noise and teaches you how to get better at interacting with that activity. The interesting part is how it worked out what Ember picks and chooses and how the A.I. teaches you what to do with it. “Actually, we took hours and hours of video,” Israel says. “We then pulled all of those hours of recordings apart and worked out how she was making decisions on who to follow, who not to, who to block and who to engage with. We turned those human interactions into rules and made Ember.”
That sounds great, of course. But I wondered: Does Ember really understand how to interact with real people? Is the system only going to be useful when trying to land the “big influencers” of this world (something that other social listening systems excel at), or is Meshfire more nuanced than that? The answer, according to Israel, is that Meshfire really works to help you find people that are influential enough to help you, but not so ‘Internet famous’ that they won’t engage with you. As he says, the “super-connectors” of this world are great, but they’re not going to help you promote your hotel rooms in Kansas. In fact, that’s specifically related to what the company is announcing. Today, Meshfire announced a new feature that vastly expands the data available within the tool. The new analytics shows the user how completion of their task cards leads to increased engagement, who the top engagers are, what their top tweets are, and how many impressions their content received. Those metrics can be printed out and the raw data can be downloaded for use in their own reports. The new analytics features are being included, without charge, for all Meshfire users. For social media power users, this means that, from one interface, Meshfire users may follow the entire path of a tweet and measure the impact that interaction has on their entire audience. Over time, these new analytics could give the user a real feel for what works, what impacts them negatively, and who their “superfans” are — the people that every company wants to nurture and have in-depth conversations with. That personal interaction is something that Israel deeply feels is lacking in a lot of “social” media today. “If we were to start again with social media – a completely clean slate — we’d like to see real human interaction rather than all the automatic output we witness today. It’s funny to say this considering Ember is A.I. and we’ve built a web tool that automates certain processes, but that’s what we’re trying to do with Meshfire: make social ‘human’ again,” he told me. “We’re seeing, for example, huge political campaigns where, with just a small team of people and Meshfire, you can have individual conversations with citizens to help them understand your policies on a one-to-one basis. With other systems, what we see is ‘broadcast messaging’ that might be pertinent to some people but irrelevant to others. We’re trying to help you build a personal connection to everyone that wants your products or services and allow you to manage that within a small team.”
Having tried Meshfire out for myself, I see a lot that I like in the product. The philosophy behind the solution reminded me of the marketing ethos and ideas put forward by Scott Stratten in his “Unmarketing” books, and it turns out that I wasn’t very wide of the mark. “A lot of the Meshfire philosophy can be found in those books. When it comes down to it, we like any tools that automate the grunt-work but still allow the individual to talk directly to people”, says Eli. For me, and anyone else that has to manage one or more social media accounts, that ideal alone makes Meshfire worth its weight in gold. Or, since we’re talking about Seattle here, let’s say that it is worth its weight in coffee. Use a free or cheap marketing automation system? Tell us what's great about it (and not so great) , and we'll share survey data from everyone else with you. Topics >

How Meshfire is making social media human again … through artificial intelligence

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Meshfire is a social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence. Spend less time managing social media and more time building valuable relationships and communities.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
9/21/2017	Dead		Dead	$XXM	0 FY undefined	1
10/9/2015	Unattributed	$XXM	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10
12/11/2012	Debt	$XXM	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10

Date	9/21/2017	10/9/2015	12/11/2012
Round	Dead	Unattributed	Debt
Amount		$XXM	$XXM
Investors	Dead	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Valuation	$XXM	$XXM	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	1	10	10

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