Open Source Intelligence Tech Startups In 2024

OSINT, the abbreviation for Open Source Intelligence, involves getting data from sources that are freely available to the public to make informed decisions, and is used across industries. This intelligence is taken from media outlets, internet publications, social media, public government records, for example.

The rise in OSINT’s importance can be traced back to the digital explosion and the massive increase in publicly accessible data. This has really changed how businesses approach intelligence, offering a cost-effective method to obtain actionable insights.

 

What Is OSINT Used For?

 

Threat Detection: Monitoring online activities for security threats.
Market Research: Gathering consumer and competitor insights.
Investigative Journalism: Uncovering hidden stories through public records.

 

Market Insights On OSINT In 2023/24

 

According to Rupchand Kawade, a Business Analyst at Dimension Market Research, the OSINT market is expected to grow from USD 8.3 billion in 2024 to USD 64.9 billion by 2033, reflecting a substantial annual growth rate of 25.6%. The demand can be credited to the need for better cybersecurity measures, more efficient data management, and even strategic insights across sectors- industry experts report more than 328 million terabytes of data are created every day. This further justifies the need.

 

Startups Who Are Changing The OSINT Game

 

The rising demand calls for more startups to attend to the need for OSIT. Here are a few startups who are effectively using the technology:

 

1. OSINT Industries

 

 

 

This startup offers a real-time OSINT automation platform for email and phone numbers, enhancing the ability of organisations to analyse publicly accessible data effectively. Particularly useful for background checking, sophisticated investigations into crime and counter-terrorism, their solution fully automates the first part of an OSINT investigation.

Particularly committed to public safety, OSINT Industries provides free access to their tools for government and law enforcement agencies, aiding in crucial investigations and fostering a safer environment. Their API also allows seamless integration into various platforms, making it easier for users to streamline and elevate their OSINT tasks.

Find out more about OSINT Industries here.

2. Filigran Extended Threat Management Suite

 

 

 

Filigran offers an all-inclusive platform designed to enhance cybersecurity by integrating threat intelligence, adversary simulation, and cyber risk management solutions. Organisations can efficiently gather and analyse cyber threat intelligence, facilitating quicker and more informed decision-making during incidents.

The suite includes advanced features for managing knowledge, incidents, and data visualisations, promoting effective collaboration across teams. With over 4,200 organisations using Filigran, it stands as a tested solution for enhancing cybersecurity measures and preparedness.

 

3. Feedly for Threat Intelligence

 

 

 

Feedly for Threat Intelligence empowers cybersecurity teams with AI-enhanced tools to monitor and analyse open-source intelligence. This service improves response times and decision-making by transforming articles and reports into actionable intelligence.

Feedly’s integration capabilities foster collaboration by linking insights across the security stack. Renowned companies like Cloudflare and Airbus rely on Feedly for real-time threat detection and comprehensive digital threat surveillance, making it an essential tool in modern cybersecurity arsenals.

 

4. Crimewall By SocialLinks

 

 

This OSINT Investigation Platform streamlines the intelligence cycle with automated data extraction from over 500 sources, coupled with powerful visualisation and processing tools. Users can navigate and analyse complex data arrangements easily and produce detailed reports efficiently.

The platform’s machine learning capabilities minimise manual tasks and enhance workflow, offering access to a diverse range of data from social media to the Dark Web. It’s an indispensable tool for detailed intelligence gathering and investigative efforts.

 

5. Fivecast OSINT Solutions

 

 

 

Fivecast delivers top-tier open-source intelligence solutions tailored for sectors like national security and corporate security. Their AI-driven tools handle vast data collections from the web, offering deep, actionable insights into risks through text, images, and video analysis.

Fivecast’s heritage in intelligence and unmatched data access provide a unique edge, supporting intelligence teams in quickly identifying and responding to threats. This platform is crucial for those needing extensive, timely, and targeted data collection.

 

 

6. VoxCroft Analytics

 

 

VoxCroft Analytics combines human expertise and AI to deliver intelligence that influences policy and decision-making globally. By analysing open-source data, VoxCroft provides deep insights into public sentiment and media discourse, aiding government bodies, NGOs, and businesses in strategic communication and risk management.

Their advanced sentiment analysis and media survey capabilities enable a profound understanding of societal trends and opinions, essential for effective engagement and stability in sensitive environments.

 

7. Mistral AI

 

 

Mistral AI specialises in open-source generative AI technology for developers and businesses. Operating under the Apache 2.0 license, Mistral offers customisable models such as Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B, which are accessible for a variety of applications and can be integrated into different environments through their platform, La Plateforme.

These models boast high performance and efficiency, optimised for commercial use and are available through cloud partners like Azure, AWS, and Snowflake. Mistral AI champions open-source technology, ensuring users can modify and adapt their models freely, promoting transparency and innovation in AI development.

 

8. Together AI

 

 

Together AI provides a cloud platform designed for building and running generative AI applications. It supports the development of custom AI models through tools like Together Fine-Tuning and Together GPU Clusters, allowing users to train models with their data, optimise them for specific needs, and deploy them at scale.

The platform’s backend is renowned for its speed and efficiency, significantly reducing the time and cost associated with AI development. Together AI is underpinned by cutting-edge research, including projects like Cocktail SGD and FlashAttention, which enhance the performance of AI models in distributed environments.

 

9. Blackdot

 

 

 

 

Blackdot is a UK-founded and owned tech company based in Cambridge, with under 50 employees. Its mission is to help investigators use OSINT for good by equipping them with the software they need to combat criminal activity effectively. Its award-winning platform, Videris, is already trusted by government agencies, law enforcement, financial institutions and major corporates around the world to streamline processes and improve investigation outcomes.

With ever-increasing volumes of data available online, organisations must ensure that they can use Open Source Intelligence effectively to identify, understand and mitigate risk. However, manual investigation processes, huge amounts of data and security concerns can hamper their ability to do so. Blackdot was founded in response to this problem, supporting investigators to extract intelligence from digital data and countering emerging threats.

Videris illuminates intelligence in open source data by providing investigators with a single platform for disparate OSINT data. Federated search, AI-enabled analytics and network analysis tools help investigators to unlock the rich range of insights available in OSINT.

As part of the OSINT community, the Blackdot team aims to listen to investigators’ challenges and is constantly working to find new ways to support them.

 

10. Zango AI

 

 

The core of its offering is a sophisticated platform that empowers compliance teams to become more effective and intelligent in their work. By leveraging this platform, businesses are able to unlock new growth opportunities and enhance their operational efficiency. One of the standout features of Zango AI’s software is its alert system, which notifies companies of any regulatory changes pertinent to their operations.

The AI technology then processes this information to generate clear, actionable steps for immediate implementation. Moreover, Zango AI introduces a unique ‘co-pilot’ feature, where businesses can upload regulatory documents directly to the platform. This feature allows for enhanced query-based interaction with the system, facilitating better management of compliance documentation and processes.

Trusted by industry leaders such as Monzo, Zango AI is reputed for accelerating compliance-related activities by up to ten times. It assures a quicker compliance process and peace of mind for compliance teams, ensuring they maintain trust and reliability in their operations.

Zango AI recently underwent a rebranding from its former identity, MyVega, reflecting its evolving vision and capabilities. Headquartered in London, the company secured its latest round of pre-seed funding in September 2023, positioning itself for further growth and impact in the tech-driven compliance landscape.

 

11. Xapien

 

 

Xapien is a more mature startup with a broader set of use cases and target industries, ranging from donor research for universities to ESG risk assessment to formal compliance checks. Their goal is to deliver clear and transparent information about the companies and people that businesses engage with. Dan Secretan and Shaun O’Mahony want to fully automate background research on any enterprise or person globally using AI, NLP and vast cloud compute power. The ambition is to allow anyone to be informed about their counterparts in minutes versus days.

By entering the name of any individual or organisation, the software helps companies to deliver a concise, meaningful report on any individual or organisation, that highlights personal and professional affiliations, risks, and networks, set in context in just seven minutes. Its deep technology extracts, reads and links information, delivering unique insights. The technology works just like a human would do, reading, digesting and learning, but at unparalleled speed and scale. Xapien’s natural language processing and machine learning algorithms identify not just the knowledge in any piece of text but, importantly, how it relates to the subject. This enables Xapien to weave together a unique understanding of a subject and the people, companies, events and concepts that connect to them. The company ties together oblique references to a subject and the topics relating to them, saving businesses hours of sifting through search results and websites.

 

12. Web Check

 

 

OSS developers are fans of open data and intelligence, so there is a dynamic landscape of open-source OSINT tools. One of the top solutions, Web Check, was developed by Alicia Skies, a London-based software engineer with a particular interest in privacy-respecting software and security. Web Check is licenced under MIT and it is an open-source, all-in-one Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) tool for analysing any website.

In OSINT, information is collected from publicly available sources using techniques like scraping websites or retrieving data from open APIs like Twitter’ s/X’s to find something specific in the information already online, regardless of whether it is used by IT security pros, hackers, or state-sanctioned intelligence operatives.

Web-Check’s approach is simple. A user types a URL into Web-Check before it gathers, collates, and presents a broad array of open data for analysis.

Its report highlights potential attack vectors, existing security measures, and the web of connections within a site’s architecture. The results can also help optimise server responses, configure redirects, manage cookies, or fine-tune DNS records for a website.

So, whether the user is a developer, system administrator, security researcher, penetration tester, or someone just interested in discovering a given site’s underlying technologies, Web-Check is a useful addition to your array of tools.