Dataminr

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Dataminr
Company typePrivate company
IndustryReal-time information
Founded2009; 16 years ago (2009)
FoundersTed Bailey
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York
,
U.S.
Key people
Ted Bailey, CEO
ProductsSoftware as a Service
Number of employees
950+ (2022)
Websitedataminr.com

Dataminr is an artificial intelligence company. The company's private sector product, Dataminr Pulse, is used by corporations to monitor real-time events, and to aid with crisis response by providing playbooks, messaging tools and post-event documentation.[buzzword][1] Dataminr's First Alert technology is used by first responders, such as those helping to provide aid during natural disasters and other emergency events.[2][3] Similar applications can be achieved by social surveillance vendors such as Feedly, Geofeedia, Raven Pack, Semantic Visions, ShadowDragon, and Signal AI.[4][5][6][7][8]

Dataminr employs around 800 people and is headquartered in New York.[9] The company has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Bozeman, and Seattle, as well as London, England, Dublin, Ireland, Melbourne, Australia, and Copenhagen, Denmark.[10]

History

[edit]

Dataminr was founded in 2009 by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel and Jeff Kinsey. Dataminr came to wider notice when it issued an alert that Osama bin Laden had been killed 23 minutes faster than major news organizations.[11]

In 2014, Dataminr entered into a partnership with CNN and Twitter, resulting in Dataminr for News, a tool to "alert journalists to information that’s emerging on Twitter in real time."[12]

The company went on to detect clusters indicating future spikes in 14 different US states.[13] Seven days later, all 14 states were hit hard by the coronavirus.[13] Dataminr partnered with the UN in May 2019 to equip thousands of UN personnel with Dataminr's First Alert product for the public sector.[10][14]

Dataminr's social media intelligence contract for the FBI was taken over by Zerofox at the end of 2020.[15]

On the morning of January 5, 2021, Dataminr allegedly warned Capitol security officials of troubling online public chatter that would soon become the January 6 riot.[2]

In July 2021, Dataminr conducted its first M&A transaction when it acquired WatchKeeper, a UK-based geovisualization platform.[16] In the acquisition, Dataminr combined WatchKeeper's geovisualized data layers with its Pulse platform to provide context around events. A few months later, in October 2021, Dataminr acquired Krizo, a real-time crisis response platform based in Copenhagen, Denmark.[17]

Controversies

[edit]

Surveillance of law-abiding abortion rights protests

[edit]

According to reports from The Intercept, Dataminr has provided social media surveillance on lawful, constitutionally-protected pro-abortion rights protests to the US Marshals.[18]

Surveillance of racial justice protests

[edit]

In 2020, The Intercept released a report that police departments used Dataminr services for surveillance during the George Floyd protests, including accessing social media posts about protest locations and actions. As written in the article, "The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies."[19] Twitter claimed that the company was just "news alerting."[20] In response to the article, Dataminr clarified that "First Alert identifies breaking news events without any regard to the racial or ethnic composition of an area where a breaking news event occurs. … Race, ethnicity, or any other demographic characteristic of the people posting public social media posts about events is never part of determining whether a breaking news alert is sent to First Alert clients."[21] It also said that "First Alert does not enable any type of geospatial analysis. First Alert provides no feature or function that allows a user to analyze the locations of specific social media posts, social media users or plot social media posts on a map."[21]

Surveillance of pro-Palestinian protests and collaboration with LAPD

[edit]

In 2025, The Intercept reported that Dataminr had surveilled pro-Palestinian protests in Los Angeles and had tipped off the LAPD to pro-Palestinian demonstrations. From October 2023 to April 2024, Dataminr had alerted the LAPD to more than 50 pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including a dozen before they had occurred.[22]

References

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  1. ^ Knowles, Catherine (April 11, 2022). "Dataminr adds advanced capabilities to risk solution". IT Brief Australia.
  2. ^ a b Cohen, Zachary; Wild, Whitney (April 28, 2021). "Internal emails reveal Capitol security officials dismissed warnings about troubling social media posts before January 6 riot". CNN.
  3. ^ Tan, Gillian (March 15, 2021). "Dataminr to Discuss Funding at Over $3.6 Billion Valuation". Bloomberg.
  4. ^ Lunden, Ingrid. "Signal AI, a 'decision augmentation' startup, raises $50M for a platform that extracts insights from the internet and other public content | TechCrunch". TechCrunch. Retrieved 14 July 2025. While comparisons to companies like Dataminr are fair, Benigson said, Signal AI differs from these as it provides more context both in the kinds of queries that can be asked by users, and in the responses that are given.
  5. ^ "How to Stay on Top of Breaking News (Published 2018)". nytimes.com. Retrieved 14 July 2025.
  6. ^ "The State Police Are Watching Your Social Media". New York Focus. Retrieved 14 July 2025. Geofeedia and Media Sonar's protest monitoring violated the major social media companies' policies, which prohibit using their platforms to conduct "surveillance"; Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram promptly severed the companies' access to their internal data. After that, the State Police didn't renew their contract with Geofeedia, records show. The department kept Media Sonar around for one more year, while at the same time trying out another social media monitoring company: Dataminr.
  7. ^ "Geopolitical Risk Data Moves from Foreign Intelligence to Fund Management - WatersTechnology.com". WatersTechnology.com. Retrieved 14 July 2025. Predata is one such startup looking to fill in this gap, as are the likes of RavenPack, Causality Link, Dataminr and Heckyl, among others.
  8. ^ Kwet, Michael. "ShadowDragon: Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move". The Intercept. Retrieved 14 July 2025.
  9. ^ Yu, Roger (January 29, 2014). "Dataminr, Twitter unveil early news detection tool". USA Today.
  10. ^ a b D'Onfro, Jillian (September 17, 2019). "AI 50: America's Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Companies". Forbes.
  11. ^ "Dataminr, Twitter unveil early news detection tool". USA Today. Archived from the original on 2022-10-26.
  12. ^ Ha, Anthony (January 29, 2014). "CNN And Twitter Partner With Dataminr To Create News Tool For Journalists". TechCrunch.
  13. ^ a b Tangermann, Victor. "Data Firm Says Its AI Predicts Where Next COVID-19 Spike Will Be". Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  14. ^ Vacarelu, Felicia (July 1, 2019). "UN Global Pulse, Dataminr Partnership Equips UN Teams with AI Tech to Keep Abreast of Crises". United Nations Global Pulse.
  15. ^ Aaron C. Davis (31 October 2021). "Warnings of violence before Jan. 6 precipitated the Capitol riot". Washington Post. Retrieved 31 October 2021. On the last weekend of 2020, the FBI lost access to Dataminr,... But the end-of-the-year changeover limited the FBI's understanding of what was happening online at a key juncture
  16. ^ Ha, Anthony (January 29, 2014). "Dataminr's first ever acquisition is UK-based geovisualization platform WatchKeeper". TechCrunch.
  17. ^ Cotton, Barney (October 15, 2021). "Dataminr acquires real-time crisis response platform Krizo". Business Leader.
  18. ^ Biddle, Sam (May 15, 2023). "U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr". The Intercept. Retrieved 2023-05-15.
  19. ^ Biddle, Sam (2020-07-09). "Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr". The Intercept. Retrieved 2020-07-12.
  20. ^ "Twitter Says Its Partner Dataminr Wasn't Surveilling Protests for Local Cops, Just 'News Alerting'". Gizmodo. 9 July 2020. Retrieved 2020-07-12.
  21. ^ a b Biddle, Sam (October 21, 2020). "Twitter Surveillance Startup Targets Communities of Color for Police". The Intercept.
  22. ^ Biddle, Sam (2025-03-17). "LAPD Surveilled Gaza Protests Using This Social Media Tool". The Intercept. Retrieved 2025-03-21.