Squire Patton Boggs has advised Maltego Technologies GmbH on its acquisition of PublicSonar operated by Crowdsense B.V. and Social Network Harvester operated by Freezingdata GmbH.
Corporate partners Jeroen Sombezki in Amsterdam and Norman Wasse in Frankfurt led the cross-border team advising Maltego.
“We’re very pleased to support Maltego in these strategic acquisitions,” said Norman Wasse. “The two transactions demonstrate the combined strength of our pan-European private equity offering with our excellent teams constantly growing in Amsterdam and Frankfurt.”
Jeroen Sombezki commented, “These two projects underpin and demonstrate that the firm is pole-positioned to counsel its clients on increasingly complex and challenging technology M&A transactions and the cross-border impact of artificial intelligence and its regulatory aspects.”
Headquartered in Munich, Maltego provides an all-in-one investigation platform used by institutions such as the FBI and INTERPOL, financial organizations and half of the DOW 30 companies to conduct cyber investigations and analysis. Maltego is used by a broad audience, from security professionals and pen testers to forensic investigators, investigative journalists, and market researchers. Maltego empowers investigators to speed up and increase the precision of their investigations through easy data integration in a single interface, aided by powerful visualization and collaborative capabilities to quickly zero in on relevant information. The company was acquired by Charlesbank Capital Partners in 2023.
PublicSonar was developed and founded in 2012 in The Hague, The Netherlands, by a team led by Richard Stronkman and Hans Burghard. PublicSonar aims to simplify large-scale data analysis during the monitoring of public incidents, crises, or events. It is a real-time analytics platform for generating insights based on social media, news, and public blogs for incidents and trends that could impact public safety.
Social Network Harvester, developed and founded in 2015 by a team led by Benno Krause and Erik Nolte, is a software solution used by law enforcement investigators and intelligence analysts for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing social media profiles, connections, and interactions.