Dataminr Founded to Provide Real-Time Social Media Surveillance, Later Backed by CIA Venture Capital

Dataminr was founded in New York City by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel, and Jeff Kinsey to provide real-time monitoring and analysis of social media data streams. The company secured a direct licensing agreement with Twitter to purchase the platform’s complete “firehose” of public tweets, positioning itself as a critical intermediary between social media platforms and government, corporate, and financial sector clients seeking instant alerts about emerging events, trends, and potential threats. Unlike traditional social media analytics firms, Dataminr specialized in algorithmic detection of breaking news and significant events from billions of social media posts, providing what it marketed as unparalleled “situational awareness” capabilities.

The company received investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s nonprofit venture capital arm, marking it as part of a broader intelligence community strategy to develop social media surveillance infrastructure. This CIA connection, disclosed publicly in 2016 alongside investments in similar firms like Geofeedia and PATHAR, revealed the extent to which U.S. intelligence agencies were funding the development of tools to monitor public social media activity. Twitter itself acquired an approximately 5 percent stake in Dataminr, creating a complex relationship where the social media platform both supplied data to and held ownership in a company that would facilitate government surveillance of its users.

Dataminr’s founding represented a significant development in the commercialization of social media surveillance, establishing a business model that would generate controversy over the following decade as the company sold its monitoring capabilities to law enforcement agencies, federal intelligence services, and private corporations. The firm’s technology enabled what critics would later describe as mass surveillance of constitutionally protected speech, targeting protest movements, activist organizing, and political demonstrations. By 2016, Dataminr would hold contracts with the FBI worth over $1 million and serve hundreds of police departments nationwide, making it a central player in the emerging ecosystem of digital surveillance capitalism that converted public social media expression into intelligence products for government consumption.