WASHINGTON — The CEO for Dataminr said his company’s tech will be going live as part of NATO’s Maven Smart System sometime this week, days after the open source tech company was awarded a $318 million contract with the Pentagon.
“NATO is our second largest customer, and NATO is now a customer of First Alert Advanced, and they have deployed it to the entire NATO enterprise in Palantir Maven Smart Systems, and that is actually going live next week,” Ted Bailey, founder and CEO of Dataminr, told Breaking Defense last week.
First Alert Advanced is the company’s latest AI suite, including what the firm calls autonomous “intel agents” to scan for information, synthesize it and provide “live” briefs to customers. The tool also offers “tactical predictive intelligence,” which uses data to attempt to peek into the future.
NATO’s MSS, provided by Palantir, is an AI platform that connects different command and control systems. That architecture allows Dataminr’s system to be embedded in NATO’s environment, providing the platform open source intelligence and corroboration but also synthesizing info from military-specific sensors.
As for the Pentagon contract, a DoD announcement on Friday said the company would provide their capabilities, including “situational awareness, force protection, and indications and warnings on global events,” to the entirety of the Department of Defense last week for five years. That’s every command and all field activities, up to three million licensed users, Bailey said.
At its core, Dataminr’s tech provides open source intelligence through what it calls “multimodal fusion,” meaning it scrapes the internet as well as other open channels — such as plane and ship transponders — along with images, video, sound and 150 languages, to provide a near real time view of the picture in any given area, according to the company.
“What we genuinely accomplish for [DoD] is giving them real-time situational awareness of all events,” Bailey said. “Now, while those things are very discreet, you can imagine situational awareness, force protection, and [indications and warning] on emerging events are staples of what a military does, pretty much across all functions.”
With the proliferation of so much publicly available data over the past few decades, the Pentagon and Intelligence Community have been racing for efficient ways not only to collect the data, but to combine it with other open source as well as classified information and then effectively analyze the bunch.
As Dataminr becomes more integrated into military systems, Bailey said they’ll be able to sync their platform to begin fusing not just publicly available information, but the exquisite sensors.
In addition to providing a view of on the ground events, the platform can also provide some level of prediction using past patterns as a reference. For example, Bailey noted that after the first US and Israeli strikes against Iran — which he claimed the system picked up 15 minutes before any mainstream news coverage — the predictive intelligence foresaw significant disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, skyrocketing oil prices and deaths of senor leaders.
“The patterns of the past were able to meet an LLM [large language model] and actually predict those set of things,” he said.
Bailey later said that the platform alerted users to the first strikes on Iran at 1:12 AM on Feb. 28, three minutes before US Central Command would later say the operation formally began.
In the interview Friday, Bailey said the company expects continued growth going forward.
“It’s not just US. We’ve really tackled the military market more broadly, and inside NATO, there’s 17 other militaries, 15 member nations, and so we’re really seeing just an appetite for capability in defense that is radically accelerating,” he said.