The LSE Directory / Data providers
Dataminr is a New York based technology company that builds an AI platform for real time event, threat and risk detection. It continuously analyses more than a million public data sources, including text in over 150 languages, images, video, audio and sensor signals, using more than 50 proprietary large language models to surface and contextualise breaking events as they happen, reportedly detecting close to 500,000 events, risks and threats per day and ingesting roughly 43TB of data daily. The core output is an alert, delivered ahead of conventional news cycles, describing what is happening, where, and why it matters to a given client's operations. The company organises its platform into several client facing products rather than selling raw data alone: Dataminr for Corporate Security (protecting people, facilities and events), Dataminr for Cyber Defense (connecting public threat signals to a client's internal exposure), First Alert (for public sector and emergency response use), and Dataminr for News (breaking news discovery for journalists). This positions it less as a market data vendor and more as a physical security, cyber and public sector risk intelligence provider, competing on breadth of public source coverage and speed of detection rather than depth of any single proprietary dataset. Its customer base spans corporate security and cyber defence teams, government and public safety agencies, and newsrooms, rather than the buy side or sell side trading desks that many other entries in this directory serve. Dataminr was founded in 2009 by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel and Jeff Kinsey; Bailey remains CEO. The company is widely reported to have detected the death of Osama bin Laden roughly 23 minutes ahead of major news outlets, an early proof point for its detection approach. It has held a data partnership with Twitter (now X) since 2014 and has worked with the United Nations since 2019. Dataminr employs on the order of 1,000 employees across six global offices and states it is used by more than 100 US government agencies, over 20 international governments, two thirds of the Fortune 50 and half of the Fortune 100, plus over 1,500 newsrooms; its private valuation was reported at over 3.6 billion dollars as of a 2021 funding round. It raised further capital in 2025, including an 85 million dollar round from NightDragon and HSBC in March and convertible debt financing from Fortress Investment Group and NightDragon in April, followed by additional convertible debt in September. In late 2025 Dataminr moved to expand into cyber threat intelligence, announcing in October and closing in November an acquisition of ThreatConnect, an Arlington, Virginia based cyber threat intelligence and risk quantification vendor whose platform is used by roughly a third of the Fortune 50, for 290 million dollars. The stated aim is to fuse Dataminr's external, public signal detection with ThreatConnect's internal client data to power more personalised, agentic AI alerting. Separately, reporting by The Intercept has documented Dataminr's social media monitoring being supplied to law enforcement, including the US Marshals and city police departments, to track protest activity around abortion rights, racial justice demonstrations and pro Palestinian campus protests; Dataminr has characterised this as legitimate news alerting rather than targeted surveillance.
