Why We Invested in Fivecast
As cybersecurity specialist investors, we are continually mindful of the dynamic geopolitical landscape. This includes how countries with democratically elected governments (especially the Five Eyes intelligence community) collaborate to discover and share critical information. Open-source Intelligence (“OSINT”) has become monumentally more challenging (and vital) in an age where digital content is of vast and ever-increasing scale. As the content and information landscape changes, useful capture and collection will require novel and innovative approaches. Trends towards automated content generation, including from AI, will only accelerate the challenge – and the opportunity for those who do it successfully and with immediate impact for customers.
The OSINT sector is one we’ve watched for some time, noting its large TAM (Total Addressable Market), high projected growth due to the explosion of data generated and available online, and fundamental importance to better security outcomes for both government and enterprises. When meeting the team behind our latest portfolio company, Fivecast, we quickly saw how their ability to apply advanced data collection and AI and ML to extract meaningful insight from vast amounts of online data could help the company capture a position of dominance in the OSINT market.
Fivecast uses advanced multi-media collection and the skillful application of AI and ML models to gather and analyze complex open-source intelligence from masses of data, helping government agencies and intelligence analysts uncover actionable insights and make better decisions. The Fivecast Onyx platform enables automated data collection and analysis, dramatically improving accuracy and speed, and collects information across an impressive number of languages, data types, sites, and formats. This approach helps solve diverse intelligence challenges, including identifying extremists, terrorists, and drug trafficking suspects and fighting organized crime, crypto scams, and money laundering. The integrity and efficacy of the platform have been recognized by customers across the Five Eyes countries: Fivecast is the first Australian company to be awarded a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) project with the US Department of Defense.
One of the factors that impressed us most about Fivecast was the solid and capable team behind it. Led by co-founders Dr. Brenton Cooper, Duane Rivett, David Blockow and Ross Buglak with decades of technical and defense-related experience, the team has already achieved strong traction in the government and intelligence community. Now with more than 100 employees globally, the leadership team has built a team that can execute the significant opportunity in front of them.
This investment differs from many others in our portfolio because it is not based on a disruptive technological innovation in a particular element of the enterprise tech stack. Instead, this investment is about helping to develop a new kind of tool that addresses many large macro themes we see on the horizon, including emerging needs of democratic governments, open-source intelligence sharing at speed and new levels of scope, and the latest analytics tools needed to understand and succeed in a world of “web-scale” data. Here, we see tremendous room for innovation and growth. This includes moving more solidly into the US and UK markets in response to substantial and growing demand there. We look forward to putting the total resources of Ten Eleven’s operating and cyber expertise at the company’s service, to help it find additional success in the months and years ahead. We are proud to be joined in this round by Main Sequence, a firm with which we are co-investors in our portfolio company, Kasada, and South Australian Venture Capital Fund. With its unique technology and experienced leadership team, we believe Fivecast will be the leader in the growing and vital OSINT market. Fivecast technology solutions help make the world a safer place by delivering crucial, digestible, actionable open-source intelligence to those who need it most to protect our global community.
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