The government-backed strategic investor In-Q-Tel has made a strategic investment in Forge.AI, a company focused on processing unstructured data found in open sources such as news reports and social media and turning it into machine-ready data with predictive capabilities based on world events in real-time using artificial intelligence.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed. The company also said that it has added retired Army. Gen. John Mulholland to its advisory board.
IQT is a not-for-profit investor that aims to accelerate the development and introduction of leading-edge technologies for U.S. national security agencies. For Forge.AI, which is based in Massachusetts, the investment is its first foray into the national intelligence area.
“We are excited to partner with IQT and the communities they represent,” Jim Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Forge.AI, said in a statement. “The fact that Forge.AI’s capabilities are fundamentally amplifying and accelerating the analytical, predictive, and decision-making capabilities of these critical communities makes us deeply proud and we are eager to continue this journey with IQT as a partner. We believe Forge.AI can meaningfully enhance situational awareness, course of action hypothesis testing, supply chain modeling, counter-WMD modeling, and force protection planning, to name a few.”
Forge.AI was founded in 2017 and its clients are mainly in financial services. The company has 25 employees. The company says its automated technology fuses “text heavy” data from news, social media, radio, television, podcasts, Securities Exchange Commission filings and more and turns it into relevant data in real-time.
“It’s critical that our government partners are not only made aware of changes and events in the world that are relevant to their areas of interest in real-time, but more importantly, that such information can be directly incorporated into their machine-driven analytical processes,” Eugene Chiu, partner, Investment at IQT, said in a statement. “Forge AI. Is uniquely positioned to make this happen. They are in effect capturing and translating the unstructured global information into specialized data that fuels analytical and decision-making processes, resulting in meaningful knowledge and a predictive edge.”
Mulholland retired from the Army in 2015 with final assignment as associate director of Military Affairs at the CIA. Previously, he commanded Army Special Forces and joint Special Operations Forces, and led task forces in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom.