February 27, 2025
The AI Firm Turning 1M Real-Time Data Sources Into Actionable Intelligence
(greenbutterfly/Shutterstock)
Keeping up with events in today’s highly connected world is no easy task. From breaking news and extreme weather to the latest TikTok craze and zero-day vulns on the Dark Web, there’s a glut of information that’s certain to overwhelm any individual. That’s what makes the multi-modal information synthesis of a 16-year-old company called Dataminr so remarkable.
Dataminr’s mission is simple: relentlessly consume all event data from public sources, including text, image, video, and sound, and transform that raw data into actionable information that benefit its customers, including the Department of Defense, NATO, 1,500 news organizations, 20 foreign governments, and two thirds of the Fortune 50. How the company actually achieves that mission, however, is another story.
Founded in 2009, the New York City company has been a pioneer in multi-modal fusion, which is the process of taking a variety of different data inputs and merging them together to create a comprehensive analysis that’s superior to analyzing each data modality separately. Dataminr’s data firehose currently consists of 1 million data sources, which generates 43TB of raw data per day, said Dataminr Chief Partner Officer Matt Harrell.
The company uses dozens of large language models (LLMs) and other AI techniques to automatically analyze and summarize the information, which is delivered as alerts to paying customers. It’s currently generating 400,000 alerts a day across various topics, which customers can subscribe to on an individual basis via its offerings, such as Dataminr Pulse, First Alert, Dataminr for News, Pulse for Corporate Security, and Pulse for Cyber Risk.
“It would take one human 950 years to consume one day’s worth of data that we ingest,” Harrell told BigDATAwire. “I you think about the big data problem there, that’s where AI comes in handy. We apply 50 large language models against that data set to then draw correlations and then surface real time real-time threats.”
Dataminr kept clients up-to-date when mercenary group Wagner marched on Moscow (Source: Dataminr)
The goal of the company is to transform the future real-time information using newly available sources of digital data, said CEO and Founder Ted Bailey.
“If you’re an individual on the ground seeing an event, taking a picture and publishing it in social media, you’re recording that event in digital data,” Bailey said at MIT’s Imagination in Action event last year. “If a sensor on a ship detects it veering off course, that is recording an event in digital data. If a plane transponder in the sky goes dark all of a sudden again, these events are recorded in digital data.”
When the container ship Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge near Baltimore on May 13, 2024, Dataminr was the first to detect the event. The company’s clients received an alert about the event “about an hour ahead of all mainstream media sources,” Bailey said. “Our clients, who were first responders and corporations, were able to use that signal to respond and save lives.”
Sorting out what’s real and what’s important amid the sea of data signals isn’t easy. Combining data generated by humans with machine and sensor data can yield information that is actionable and can potentially save lives.
“You may, for example, see a video that indicates a threat and that’s confirmed with an audio signal or through text,” said Harrell, who joined the company last summer. “Being able to correlate those signals, those events into a single action is the secret sauce of what the AI platform does.”
Dataminr co-founder and CEO Ted Bailey
Getting actionable information into the hands of people who can make a difference isn’t easy. To streamline that process, the company today announced that its Dataminr First Alert service will be free for all qualifying nonprofit organizations operating for the public benefit. “First Alert for Nonprofits guarantees nonprofits equitable access to advanced situational awareness tools, to keep staff safe, and to continue delivering on their missions to serve the world’s most vulnerable,” Jessie End, Dataminr’s vice president of social good, said in a statement.
Static reports can get stale, which necessitates constant updates. To help keep customers current with the latest events, the company last year launched something called ReGenAI, which automatically updates alerts based on the latest data. According to CEO Bailey, ReGenAI is only possible because the company has invested in a vast data archive consisting of all events over the past decade and proprieatary LLMs to process it.
“We do something with AI that others can’t do,” he said. “We don’t just plug into one of these multi-purpose AI APIs that everyone is plugging into and trying to build generative AI. We’ve built our own foundation models, our own LLMs that are trained and customized on a data asset that only we have.
“We have an archive of all events that our AI platform has detected over the last 12 years, and that is the key to unlocking the value we can deliver,” Bailey continued. “All of that has brought about what we announced earlier today, which is a new form of generative AI called ReGenAI, that is the first generative AI that automatically regenerates in real time.”
Dataminr supports 150 different languages, which make its product applicable around the globe. Harrell, who previously led partner efforts at Google Cloud and Cloudflare, has been tasked with heading up Dataminr’s new partner program.
There are several ways companies can partner with Dataminr, across two tiers, select and elite. Technology alliance partners bring in new source of signal to the platform. For example, the partnership formed with Esri two days ago will bring Dataminr customers access to Esri’s industry-leading geospatial data via its ArcGIS product.
“Combining Dataminr’s groundbreaking AI with Esri’s world-leading GIS mapping software empowers organizations with unprecedented decision-making capabilities informed by critical emerging events and advanced geospatial awareness,” Thomas Fair, the director of the Esri Partner Network, said in a statement.
Companies working in specific industries can also partner with Dataminr to deliver the AI-powered intelligence feed to specific customers. Satellite companies, for example, could partner with Dataminr to bring their imaging capability to more customers. “They have a lot of intelligence looking top down into what’s happening, but they don’t have real time intelligence at the ground level,” Harrell says. “Dataminr helps satellite operators make better decisions on where to where to point their satellites to take pictures.”
Solution providers can help Dataminr sell subscriptions to the platform, as well as providing added value around servicing and delivering the subscription. Finally, Dataminr is delivering a partner portal to simpliy the process of registering deal, launching campaigns, and getting trained.
“We’re mission-driven organization. We believe in our technology. We believe in what we’re doing,” Harrell says. “We started off as a direct company. We’re transitioning to 100% partner-first strategy. If you look at Ted on down, all the people that have joined Dataminr have a strong mission-oriented philosophy and want to help deliver real-time information to help people make better decisions.”
Dataminr is venture funded. The company has raised more than $1 billion over the years, and was recently valued at $4.1 billion.
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