With our $475M growth financing announced today, I am thrilled to have the continued opportunity to pursue Dataminr’s mission of integrating all the world’s public data signals to create the world’s leading real-time event and information discovery platform. It’s a privilege to welcome an incredible set of new investors to the Dataminr team as part of our new capital round. These investors, both new and existing, share in Dataminr’s vision for the future. These long-term oriented and visionary partners are providing us with increased resources to fulfill our mission and achieve the full scope of our company’s potential.
Building the leading real-time information discovery platform to mitigate fast-emerging, complex risks
My Dataminr journey started more than a decade ago. When I was in college, I studied the history of real-time information technologies. I was fascinated by how technologies like the printing press, telegram, radio, and television changed society when they were adopted broadly. These technologies caused fundamental shifts in the way people learned about events occurring across the world in real time.
In 2001, tragedy struck when a jet flew into the side of the World Trade Center and the horrific events of 9/11 began to unfold before our eyes. Despite the advances in real-time information technologies over the centuries, real-time information gaps prevented the people in the towers from having an accurate understanding of what had just happened. There was no technology that delivered the critical information people needed to know in order to evacuate the buildings to save their lives.
I founded Dataminr in 2009 to create that technology — the world’s first real-time information discovery platform that could detect critical breaking information from real-time public data. At the time, one-to-many public platforms like YouTube and Twitter on which people broadcast what they see, hear, and experience in the world were starting to gain adoption across society. Yet, the public digital data landscape was still very much in its infancy.
Since 2009, there has been an explosion of public digital data that is unparalleled in human history, with millions of digital platforms and IoT sensors creating billions of real-time data units every minute. When an unexpected event first takes place, that fact the event took place is immediately recorded in digital data — in rich formats spanning text, images, video, sound, and IoT sensor data. I couldn’t have imagined back in 2009 just how dramatically this universe of public data would expand in just over a decade.
I believe that the exponential growth of public digital data that describes the world’s events, combined with Dataminr’s real-time information discovery platform, represents a significant leap forward in the history of real-time information technologies — one as significant as technologies like the telegram, radio and television. I truly believe that the adoption of Dataminr by organizations across the world will be a transformative moment that will fundamentally change the way that businesses and governments operate in this century, the century of public data and AI.
Revolutionizing real-time information for thousands of organizations around the world
Today, Dataminr’s real-time information discovery platform has revolutionized real-time information for thousands of organizations across the world. From local public sector organizations here in NYC — including 12 NYC Government agencies from the Fire Department to the Office of Emergency Management — to global organizations like the United Nations and the Red Cross, which rely on Dataminr across the world in more than 100 countries. Hundreds of multinational corporations, including more than half of the Fortune 50, rely on our products for an ever expanding set of use cases, and more than 30,000 journalists in 650 newsrooms rely on Dataminr to first learn about the events they cover.
Today, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year, Dataminr is detecting the world’s events faster than has ever been possible for public and private sector organizations across the world. On December 30, 2019, Dataminr delivered the first digital warning on COVID-19 to our clients. Our real-time information discovery platform was the first to detect the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, helping a number of organizations get a head start in preparing for what ultimately became a global tragedy unlike any in the modern era. The value proposition that Dataminr offers our customers is more critical and relevant than ever before in the increasingly complex world we live in. We’re living in an era defined by large-scale, unpredictable events that have impacted organizational operations in innumerable and unforeseen ways.
The future of Dataminr’s real-time information discovery platform
For all these reasons, I believe the opportunities for Dataminr in the future are even more vast. The expansion of real-time public data is still in its early stages and accelerating at an exponential pace. About 95 percent of the 150,000 data sources that Dataminr integrates into our platform didn’t even exist in 2009. As I look ahead to the future, I expect that 95 percent of the data sources our platform will integrate by 2030 also do not yet even exist today. Continued advances in cloud computing processing capabilities, artificial intelligence, deep learning neural networks, and human-AI feedback loops, will further accelerate the performance of our platform in the coming years. And, I have deep conviction that we have only scratched the surface of the potential use cases for Dataminr’s platform, a horizontal capability with future applications far beyond what we can possibly imagine today.
Any entrepreneur and founder needs a world class team to build a company to its full potential. I am truly grateful to Dataminr’s incredible team for all the work they’ve done over the last 11+ years to get us to where we are today. From our brilliant engineers and data scientists, to our highly talented and tireless domain experts, to our exceptional and endlessly motivated sales team, and the rest of the incredible Dataminr team -— all of whom have shown unwavering commitment and dedication to the company and our mission. Every single member of the Dataminr team deserves credit for our success.
With this new growth financing, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to continue to pursue the company’s mission and to continue to invest aggressively in the future. I consider it an honor to be able to push the company forward with these increased resources to be a pioneer in this exciting century of real-time public data and AI.
