open-source-intelligence
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The Most Interesting Company Is the One Behind the Company
WireScreen turns scattered Chinese corporate records into a map of ownership, influence, and risk. Its bet is that the decisive fact about a business often sits several companies away.
The $25,000 Search Box That Taught the Pentagon to Buy Software
Vannevar Labs began with an Arabic OCR project nobody urgently needed. Then two engineers built one useful search box - and discovered that in defense technology, relevance beats polish every time.
Brett Granberg Learned to Stop Adding Features
The Vannevar CEO spent months polishing an Arabic OCR tool nobody wanted. Forty or fifty quiet sales meetings later, a weekend Mandarin model taught him the lesson that now organizes his company: begin with the mission problem, then earn the technology.
The Firm That Reads the Room Before Washington Does
The Wolverine Group has spent years helping federal teams understand noisy information environments. Now it is applying the same habit to a quieter problem: how government actually buys, teaches, and uses AI without surrendering judgment.
Neotas Hunts the Risks That Never Made the Watchlist
Most compliance tools ask whether a person is already on a list. Neotas searches the wider digital trail, maps the connections and leaves an audit trail for the human who still has to make the call.
Babel Street Built an AI Analyst for People Who Can't Afford a Bad Guess
The Washington intelligence-software company spent years helping analysts search a noisy world. Now it is asking AI agents to do the legwork - while humans keep the last word.
RANE Bought a 20-Year Forecasting Machine - Then Built the Risk Desk Most Companies Cannot Afford
The New York risk-intelligence company turned Stratfor's forecasting discipline into a subscription platform for executives facing too many alerts and too little time. Its bet: the valuable product is not more information, but a defensible decision.
Adam Beaugh Built a Machine for the 24-Minute News Cycle. Now It Watches for What Comes Next
From campaign war rooms to agent-driven intelligence, the Zignal Labs co-founder has spent 15 years turning public noise into decisions - while insisting that useful technology starts with a human problem.
The Startup Teaching Governments to Read the $20 Trillion They Can't See
Most financial crime hides in plain sight, scattered across the open web. IVIX built an AI platform that reads all of it at once - and hands governments a map.
Noam Schwartz
Noam Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Alice (formerly ActiveFence), the trust and safety company that quietly built the moderation and adversarial-intelligence pipes behind platforms serving three billion people and seven of the ten largest AI foundation models. He founded the company in 2018 after encountering child sexual abuse material while mapping the internet at his previous startup, and has led it through Series A/B rounds totaling $100M, two acquisitions (Spectrum Labs, Rewire), and a 2026 rebrand to Alice that repositions the company from social-platform moderation to securing generative AI.
Heka Global
Heka Global is a New York and Tel Aviv based fintech that turns scattered public web signals into structured, explainable consumer profiles for financial institutions. Its AI-driven web intelligence engine helps banks, insurers and pension providers detect fraud, verify identities, reconnect dormant accounts and underwrite thin-file customers - using a proprietary database of millions of records plus live open-web data. Heka raised a $14M Series A in July 2025 led by Windare Ventures with participation from Barclays and Corn`er Banca.
Outtake
Outtake is an AI cybersecurity company that deploys autonomous agents to detect, investigate, and dismantle digital threats - impersonation, phishing, fake domains, cloned apps, malicious ads, and deepfakes - across the open web, social platforms, app stores, and the dark web. Founded in 2023 by ex-Palantir engineer Alex Dhillon, the New York company turns threat detection-to-takedown into a single automated workflow, averaging takedowns in about 14 hours, and protects brands including OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Anthropic.
Idan Bar-Dov
Idan Bar-Dov is the co-founder and CEO of Heka Global, a New York and Tel Aviv company that turns the public web into real-time, audit-ready digital identities for banks, insurers, and pension funds. A fintech lawyer turned operator, he started Heka during the pandemic to reconnect people with lost financial assets and grew it into a fraud-fighting web-intelligence engine used by institutions like Barclays and Pictet. In July 2025 Heka closed a $14M Series A led by Windare Ventures, with Bar-Dov arguing that the credit bureaus built for a paper era cannot see a world where both consumers and risk now live online.