Dataminr Raises $85M to Advance Predictive, Agentic AI Tools

An information and event discovery platform that’s been around since 2009 raised $85 million to develop and launch new generative and agentic AI features.

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Dataminr said the convertible funding round led by NightDragon and HSBC will help the New York-based company build out agentic AI features that provide real-time contextual analysis of events, according to founder and CEO Ted Bailey. Dataminr also plans to build customized AI agents tailored for individual sectors and a predictive AI tool that forecasts potential next steps based on Dataminr’s proprietary data.

“Purely thinking about this from Dataminr’s perspective, it is a very favorable time for AI companies, a time when defense tech and gov tech is viewed very favorably in the eyes of investors,” Bailey told Information Security Media Group. “There certainly were a number of macro themes that were to our benefit in terms of it being a good time for the company and companies like us to take capital.”

What NightDragon, Dave DeWalt Bring to the Table

Dataminr employs 753 people and has raised $1.05 billion since its founding in 2009, including a $475 million Series F funding round in March 2021 at a $4.1 billion valuation. The company’s latest funding doesn’t have an associated valuation and includes a special purpose vehicle from NightDragon for up to an additional $100 million in convertible financing investment available to third-party investors (see: AI, Disinformation and Vendor Consolidation).

Unlike traditional equity, a convertible avoids pricing the round now and instead converts into equity at a discount during an initial public offering, which Bailey said is increasingly common among pre-IPO tech firms. The money will fuel Dataminr’s alignment with Dave DeWalt and his investment firm NightDragon through investment and a board seat after collaborating in an advisory capacity for two years.

“With all capital rounds, it’s about finding the best partner, and we’ve been working with Dave and NightDragon in an advisor capacity for a couple of years,” Bailey said. “Getting to know each other more closely, it just became a natural time for us to think about taking that one step further. There was that one extra dimension that we could add into this partnership.”

As an advisor, DeWalt contributed thought leadership, bringing new CISOs into the advisory board and helping to shape Dataminr’s cybersecurity strategy. Bailey said elevating him to investor and board member will result in deeper financial and strategic alignment. And HSBC’s presence in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the U.S. aligns with Dataminr’s ambitions to expand globally, according to Bailey.

“When you tie yourself more closely with an entity like NightDragon through investment, you’re aligning financial outcome of the company with the firm, as opposed to just more a traditional consultant advisor relationship,” Bailey said. “With any type of financial investment relationship, and with that more deep alignment of potential upside in the future, there are just broader benefits.”

Covering More Ground With Agentic, Generative AI

Dataminr’s AI capabilities have evolved from traditional real-time alerting to cutting-edge agentic AI that adds layered intelligence and prediction. The company plans to provide live, AI-generated context about emerging threats and events, deliver sector-specific intelligence customized to the needs of individual users, and predict the likely next steps of an unfolding event with forward-looking scenario modeling.

“We’re on the cusp of launching our first agentic AI release in April, called context agents,” Bailey said. “And it’s an agentic AI capability which – around the events, threats and risks that we detect – will use the power of agentic AI to write out real-time context so that our users can not only receive the benefit of early awareness and ongoing awareness through our gen AI capability.”

Much of the funding will be dedicated to Dataminr’s agentic AI roadmap, he said, allowing the company to hire, train, and scale the technical teams required to push new products into production quickly. The rest of the funding focuses on international market expansion, capitalizing on Dataminr’s already established footprint in Japan, Singapore and Australia, as well as its launch plans in the Middle East.

“It’s a very powerful product – predictive intelligence that is combining the benefits of generative AI and agentic AI together,” Bailey said. “Having the extra resources to put pedal to the metal on ambitious AI products like that is of benefit to our customers, of benefit to our revenue growth and of benefit to our IPO story.”

Dataminr is tracking both product effectiveness and financial growth metrics, he said, with the company focused on maintaining more than 99% accuracy across both its alerts as well as AI-generated content. As the company introduces new agentic and generative AI tools, maintaining that accuracy rate is critical. The firm will be laser-focused on ARR growth, margin expansion, and international revenue contribution.

“We’re a company around $200 million in ARR, with a gross margin of nearly 80% which is very favorable from a margin profile perspective,” Bailey said. “Our financial metrics are very strong. We’ll continue to look for ARR growth and margin improvement. And I would say specifically vis a vis this capital round, international growth and spurring that, which I think we’re really excited about.”