Fivecast closes $30m Series A funding round

Australian open-source intelligence (OSINT) software company Fivecast has closed its Series A funding round with close to $30 million raised to fuel its expansion and service contracts in key markets.

Dr Brenton Cooper, CEO and co-founder, Fivecast

This round of funding is led by US-based cyber security venture capital firm, Ten Eleven, with additional investment from CSIRO’s Main Sequence and the South Australian Venture Capital Fund, managed by Artesian.

Fivecast will leverage the new funding to build out its product portfolio, and drive growth in the Five Eyes community following strong momentum in Australia, a surge in demand in the US, and the establishment of its UK office.

It is also targeting the Asia Pacific region and Europe, and is adding further capabilities in adjacent use cases such corporate security and financial intelligence.

The company said it is also continuing recruitment of industry professionals, including tradecraft experts, developers, and sales and marketing personnel to its four offices, having recently achieved a milestone of more than 100 employees globally.

Dr Brenton Cooper, CEO and co-founder at Fivecast said an increasingly complex and growing threat landscape combined with the sheer volume of data available online make it extremely difficult for intelligence personnel to collect, filter and analyse data in a timely way.

He said, “Our platform enables customers to fight the proliferation of threats, pierce through sophisticated online landscapes, and speed up investigations to protect global communities and organisations.”

Since founding in 2017, Cooper said the company has enabled government agencies and corporations to identify threats, reduce risks and mitigate incidents across a range of use cases.

“From divisive US politics influencing violent extremism and China’s influence in the South pacific, through to crypto scams and money laundering,” he explained.

“This Series A funding ensures we can continue building advanced capabilities to support our customers’ targeted objectives, and add headcount to service markets across the globe – particularly in Australia, the US and the UK.”

This round of investment takes Fivecast’s total funding received to $34 million.

Alex Doll, managing partner at Ten Eleven Ventures said, “We see open-source intelligence (OSINT) as a large and emerging sector driven by the explosion of publicly available content, now growing ever-larger via the newly accessible AI-generated multi-media content platforms.

“Notably, this is our second investment in Australia, a country we know has tremendous entrepreneurial and technical talent. We will make additional investments in Australia in the years ahead and look forward to helping bridge the country's incredible tech to other markets.”

Fivecast provides OSINT technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to aid defence, intelligence, police, border security and corporations in keeping society safer.

The software enables the targeted collection and risk analysis of publicly available information for specific use cases, such as identifying extremists, terrorists, drug trafficking and organised crime.