Real-time insight provider Dataminr secures $85 million in funding

“As global risks become increasingly complex, unpredictable, and catastrophic, the demand for real-time, AI-driven intelligence has never been more urgent. When seconds matter and truth is obscure, Dataminr is helping the world’s leading organizations and governments make smarter, more informed decisions in real-time by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI,” said Dave DeWalt, Founder and CEO, NightDragon.

Dataminr, harnessing the power of advanced AI and machine learning, delivers the earliest warnings on high-impact events and critical information far in advance of other sources.

Dataminr, one the world’s leading AI companies, whose clientele range from companies like Airbus to humanitarian organizations like the United Nations, empowers them with real-time intelligence on high-impact events and emerging risks using AI-driven data analytics.

The company’s security teams can quickly identify emerging threats and determine which individuals or organizations may be at risk using AI-powered real-time information. 

This allows them to communicate necessary information promptly—usually within 60 seconds via SMS, email, or voice. This rapid response capability is essential for monitoring and ensuring the safety of executives, employees, and customers as situations evolve.

Yale graduate Ted Bailey was deeply affected by the barbaric event of 9/11, which zeroed in on the lack of real time information  technologies. With a vision to bridge this gap and create a platform which would alert a ground breaking event from public data, he founded Dataminr in the year 2009.

Since its inception, the company has served hundreds of news organizations around the world including CNN, BBC and USA Today.

The startup’s AI platform is leading AI innovation in predictive, generative and regenerative AI by utilizing the power of LLMs and multi-modal foundation models.

This way they are able to detect risks, threats and alert during critical events from more than one million public data sources – pulled from text. Images, video and audio in real time

In 2024, Dataminr launched its ReGenAI, a form of Generative AI which delivers real-time, automatically updated live information briefs to security teams, providing a rapid understanding of critical, multidimensional events as they unfold.

With widespread recognition and a strong client base, the startup secured $475 million in funding at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021. More recently, the company raised an additional $85 million through a combination of convertible financing and credit, as announced.

According to the CEO Ted Bailey, “The new capital will allow Dataminr to accelerate its growth trajectory, [and] provide investors with a discount to the IPO price or subsequent round of financing,”. “[We’ll] also use this new funding to expand [our] international go-to-market in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and to power additional products in new verticals.”

This latest round of funding was accelerated by security focussed VC NightDragon and HSBC, where Dave DeWalt, Founder and CEO of NightDragon made it clear on their motive behind this investment, “NightDragon is honored to lead this latest investment in Dataminr, as we work together to build the future of reimagined real-time decision support and become the system of record for a growing number of verticals and industries.”  

This investment comes at a time when the company is fast approaching 200M in ARR with strong growth across the enterprise, government, and defense markets, while launching Context Agents, an Agentic AI capability, that will add real-time context to breaking events in April. 

Despite its success as one of New York’s top private technologies companies, Dataminr, sometimes found itself in the middle of socio-political controversies. 

According to one of the reports by The Intercept, Dataminr alerted a federal law enforcement agency on pro-abortion protests and rallies in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. This was followed by another event, where the X affiliated Dataminr informed police on the Black Lives Matter protests.

The company continues to claim that in the coming years, they will bring newer tools, rules and technological advancements in generative AI to deliver more real time information to stay ahead of critical events and threats.