osint
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Vipul Mishra and the clues left in plain sight
Fraud investigations at a hedge fund gave Vipul Mishra a question: why were useful warning signs being overlooked? At Neotas, he and co-founder Ian Howard built a business around finding them before a decision goes wrong.
Sergiy Milman and the price of not knowing
Unpaid invoices sent Sergiy Milman looking for better questions. With YouControl and YC World, the Ukrainian founder turned that search into a business that follows corporate connections across borders.
Louis Hur and the internet's missing map
Louis Hur built StealthMole around a gap in cybersecurity intelligence about Asia. His path runs from a university hacking club to live investigations, with a classroom never very far away.
Voyager Labs and the price of connecting the dots
Voyager Labs sells AI that turns scattered online traces into investigative leads. Its story reveals why finding a connection is only the beginning of deciding what that connection means.
Penlink and the business of connecting the dots
A phone record, a web alias, a moving dot on a map. Penlink puts them in the same investigation - and makes the question of who gets to connect them harder to ignore.
Leyes Built the Spotlight. Then It Learned to Turn It Off.
A teenage publicist learned that every glowing headline leaves a trail. Leyes now sells the unusual sequel: visibility when it helps, invisibility when it matters.
The Internet Can Invent a Crisis Before Lunch. Blackbird.AI Wants to Spot It Before Breakfast
The New York startup treats online perception like a security surface. Its bet: the dangerous part is not one false post, but the network that gives it reach, speed and consequences.
Jen Snell Learned to Market AI Before AI Learned to Talk Back
Before chatbots became a category, Jen Snell was teaching companies how to give machines a useful voice. Two decades later, the Babel Street CMO is still translating between technical possibility and human judgment.
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.
Nataliia Chornohub Is Turning Open Data Into a Trust Machine
After years of persuading institutions to open their records, the Ukrainian executive now has a harder brief: make those records useful when the stakes include sanctions, reconstruction and national security.
Kristopher Schroeder Built a Room Where Risky Work Can Breathe
After 17 years inside a giant consultancy, Schroeder chose the smaller, stranger bet: build secure digital rooms where investigators, engineers and AI teams can do dangerous work without dragging the danger home.
Samdesk Built a Crisis Radar. The Real Product Is 30 Minutes to Think.
Security teams do not need another blinking alert. They need to know whether the fire, flood, shooting, or shutdown will touch their people - and samdesk is betting that AI plus human verification can buy them the most valuable commodity in a crisis: time.
The Company That Turned Corporate Security Into a Single Screen
Corporate security teams drown in tabs, feeds and spreadsheets. Ontic bet that connecting all of it in one place - now with AI - is worth $287 million to investors and the attention of the Fortune 50.
How Do You Work the Dark Web Without Getting Burned? Build a Throwaway Computer Every Single Time.
Grey Market Labs spent a decade turning intelligence tradecraft into a button. Now Fortune 100 banks and the US Army rent disposable, fully isolated workspaces that appear in minutes and leave no trail.
The Company That Attacks You Before the Scammers Do
AI made it cheap to clone a CEO's voice and email 10,000 employees at once. Adaptive Security's answer is to run those attacks first - as a drill - and see who clicks.
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.
YC World
YC World is a counterparty and corporate network risk investigation platform built by Ukrainian open-data developer YouControl. It consolidates official company records, ownership networks, sanctions lists, politically exposed persons and other risk signals across 80+ jurisdictions into a single searchable, graph-based workspace, helping compliance teams, investigators and law enforcement run AML, KYC and KYB checks and expose hidden ownership and sanctioned connections.
StealthMole
StealthMole is a Singapore-based, AI-powered deep and dark web threat intelligence company that gives governments, law enforcement agencies, and enterprises a single cloud platform for digital investigation, risk assessment, and threat monitoring. Founded in 2022 by cybersecurity veterans Louis Hur and Simon Choi, it correlates hundreds of billions of data points from the dark web, deep web, leak sites, and Telegram to surface compromised credentials, breached data, and criminal activity - with a distinct focus on Asia-specific threat coverage.
Rescana
Rescana is a cybersecurity company that builds autonomous, AI-agent-driven third-party risk management (TPRM) and external attack surface management software. Its platform discovers, classifies, assesses, monitors, and helps remediate risk across a company's vendor ecosystem - including vendors with no web presence - using agentic AI and open-source intelligence (OSINT). Founded by Guy Halfon and based between New York and Tel Aviv, Rescana targets regulated, vendor-heavy industries such as banking, telecom, healthcare, real estate and government, promising vendor-risk oversight that scales without a proportional increase in security headcount.
Guy Halfon
Guy Halfon is the co-founder and CEO of Rescana, a Tel Aviv and New York based cybersecurity company building autonomous, agent-based third-party risk management. After years running security for global gaming operator Playtech and founding boutique security consultancies, he started Rescana in 2016 to connect cyber risk to business decisions. The company now uses teams of AI agents to discover, classify and assess vendors and continuously map external attack surfaces at enterprise scale, including its no-code Vega platform.
Zignal Labs
Zignal Labs is a San Francisco-based intelligence software company that turns publicly available information into structured, real-time situational awareness. Founded in 2011 as political-media startup Politear, it pivoted into broader media analytics and now positions itself as a national-security intelligence company delivering AI and agentic tooling. Its platform ingests billions of open-source signals daily across 100+ languages, using machine learning, computer vision, and OCR to detect narratives, track influence, and flag emerging threats for enterprise, government, and defense customers.
Evan Kohlmann
Evan Kohlmann spent two decades tracking terrorists through their own chatrooms, earning the nickname 'the Terrorist Search Engine.' He built cyberintelligence firm Flashpoint from his bedroom, wrote its original code, and served as NBC News' terrorism analyst for nearly 18 years. Today he is founder and CEO of Cloudburst Technologies, a New York company that maps the off-chain human networks behind crypto fraud - the pump-and-dumps, pig-butchering rings, and market manipulation that live in forums and chatrooms rather than on the blockchain. Cloudburst raised a $7M Series A in 2025 backed by Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, and In-Q-Tel.
Ruvixx, Inc.
Ruvixx is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that helps licensing, brand protection and compliance teams turn scattered data into recoverable revenue. Its platform centralizes intellectual-property workflows - from lead detection to royalty reporting - pairing AI-driven analytics and OSINT with human expert teams. Trusted by enterprises like Dolby, Adobe, Trimble and Chaos Group, Ruvixx targets the trillion-dollar gap between what brands are owed and what they actually collect.
Moonshot
Moonshot is a London-founded technology and intelligence company that maps and disrupts online harms - from violent extremism and disinformation to gender-based violence, human trafficking, and harassment of public figures. Founded in 2015 by Vidhya Ramalingam and Ross Frenett, the firm pairs data science, OSINT, and behavioral research with field interventions like its pioneering Redirect Method, which steers people searching for extremist content toward safer alternatives. It works for governments, technology platforms (Google, Facebook, Spotify), and, more recently, sports organizations protecting athletes from online abuse.
Cloudburst Technologies
Cloudburst Technologies is a New York-based crypto threat intelligence company that gathers off-chain data at scale from the deep and dark web, chatrooms, and other online hubs of fraud to detect cryptocurrency crime before it lands on the blockchain and to identify the people behind it. Founded in 2022 by former Flashpoint founder Evan Kohlmann, the company pairs OSINT collection with AI-driven enrichment and entity resolution to serve exchanges, regulators, law enforcement, and U.S. government agencies.
Bilawal Sidhu
Bilawal Sidhu is a creative technologist, former senior product manager at Google (AR/VR & 3D Maps), host of The TED AI Show podcast, venture scout for Andreessen Horowitz, and angel investor. After shipping landmark products like Google Maps Immersive View and the ARCore Geospatial API to billions of users, he left Google to become a full-time creator, curator, and investor at the intersection of spatial intelligence, generative AI, and immersive media. His newsletter and YouTube reach over 1.6 million followers, and he made headlines in April 2026 when he built WorldView - a real-time OSINT geospatial platform - in three days.