Who Owns Dataminr?

Ted Bailey founded Dataminr in New York in 2009, building a system that scanned the public Twitter firehose to identify breaking events before mainstream outlets reported them. Early customers were financial traders and journalists who valued speed above everything else.

The U.S. government became a defining customer. Public safety agencies adopted Dataminr's First Alert product to learn about shootings, disasters, and infrastructure failures minutes after they happened. The company's systems detected the Brussels airport bombing in 2016 and the first public signals of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, cases frequently cited in profiles of the firm.

Funding rounds scaled the business. A $130 million round in 2015 and a $221 million round in 2018 were followed by the $475 million Series F in June 2021 at a $4.1 billion valuation. That year Dataminr also bought two smaller companies: WatchKeeper International, a London threat intelligence firm, and Krizo, a Danish real-time crisis response startup.

The product line matured into three families. First Alert serves governments, emergency services, and defense customers. Dataminr Pulse serves corporate security and cyber risk teams at businesses, including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. Dataminr for News serves journalists. In 2023 and 2024 the company added agentic AI capabilities, including Intel Agents that automatically generate contextual briefings about unfolding events.

The busiest period in the company's history came in 2025. Dataminr raised $485 million across three financings, won a U.S. Department of Defense First Alert contract worth up to $318 million over roughly five years, and in October announced the acquisition of ThreatConnect, a threat intelligence management platform, for $290 million. The deal closed later that year, adding about 170 employees and 250 enterprise customers.