Bloomberg: Private-Sector Sleuthing Becomes Big Business for Tech Startup

Strider was the subject of a profile feature in Bloomberg, with an emphasis on the company's agentic AI capabilities and its partnership with the State of Utah to help state officials determine which land near sensitive installations was owned by high-risk PRC entities.

Read the profile of Strider below:

Trump’s economic crackdown on China’s US interests is creating opportunities for a Utah-based intelligence firm

By: Jamie Tarabay | Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — Investigators in Utah’s Department of Public Safety were stumped.

They were probing a nondescript motorsports park nestled roughly 40 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and couldn’t figure out who really owned it.

It was an important question: Utah in 2023 was among a group of states that banned US adversaries including China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from purchasing land, and the park’s tracks lay within sight of an ammunition depot belonging to the US military.

Utah officials had used corporate and employment records to find out more about the park’s owners, a company called Mitime Utah Investment LLC. Their principals held US passports, but the trail ended there. Authorities then turned to Strider Technologies, a Utah-based fi rm that has spent nearly a decade building a private-sector version of what spy agencies do for nation states.

Using Strider’s platform — which ingests billions of publicly available documents, corporate registries, trade records, and foreign-language filings — investigators traced Mitime’s ownership structure back to entities with direct contracts and personnel ties to the Chinese government and military.

“It generated an overwhelming amount of information,” said Tanner Jensen, head of the department.

Utah officials discovered that Mitime Utah Investment LLC, which owned a motorpark property in Grantsville, had ties to the Chinese government and military.

Strider’s discovery highlighted the growing importance of private-sector sleuthing as the Trump administration accelerates its drive for the US to become less economically reliant on the world’s second-largest economy. States have followed suit with their own China-related crackdowns.

It’s an opportune time for Strider, which launched its first agentic AI capability on Thursday.

The company already has small contracts with the US Air Force, as well as state governments and NATO, and a growing list of former international intelligence officials joining its ranks.

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The business of tracking state actors — mapping their front companies, identifying their agents, following their acquisition of foreign technology — has traditionally been conducted exclusively by government intelligence agencies, funded by taxpayers and operating under classified mandates.

What they knew, they largely could not share. What they could not share, industry could not use. Strider has created a private, high-margin business out of what was once a public function and placed that capability within reach of any organization that can afford membership…

What Strider has built, by its own description, is “a digital twin of the industrial world down to the person level”— current and former employees of thousands of organizations, their suppliers, their technologies, their commercial relationships, mapped continuously from public sources, in multiple languages.

For NATO, for instance, the company works on risk evaluation, strategic intelligence and economic security capabilities, a spokesperson for the alliance said. NATO would not disclose the size of its contract with Strider.

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CEO Greg Levesque said the founding team assumed from the beginning that the platform’s success would attract risk and built the company’s architecture around that assumption: redundancy, encryption, and —critically — a “zero-touch” model, meaning Strider does not actually ingest or store customer data.

Strider’s systems, methodologies, and terms of service, he said, are designed to operate within established legal frameworks and prioritize accuracy, transparency, and responsible data use. “Our analysis is grounded in verifiable, open-source information and provides risk signals—not automated conclusions — to support informed decision-making.”

The company’s Series C post-money valuation, which closed in September 2024, was $450 million. Since that round, Levesque said the company has nearly tripled revenue and is exploring additional investment. The company now operates in 16 countries, with Levesque’s twin brother Eric, who is the president and a co-founder of Strider, now based in London.

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In a demonstration, Levesque ran a live query against the full Strider dataset: How are US-manufactured semiconductors reaching Russian and Iranian drone programs despite post-2022 sanctions? The system ran for approximately two minutes, drawing on datasets of military procurement databases in third countries, producing a map of roughly 33,000 shipments valued at approximately $240 million. It identified post-sanctions trade diversion routes running through Shenzhen and Hong Kong and ranked component suppliers by volume — with major chip companies appearing in the results…

Whether Strider has correctly identified the scale of the gap it is filling — and whether its platform closes it or merely narrows it — will be answered over time. The Utah land cases are among the clearest examples of a measurable result. The harder claim, that agentic AI can provide reliable, actionable intelligence at enterprise scale, has still to be tested in a real-world environment.

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In Utah, Tanner Jensen is waiting for the state legislature to finalize appropriations so his department can license Strider on a continuing basis.

The motorsports park was sold weeks ago to an American company. A pending sale of land near the Provo airport — traced through Strider’s system to substantial Chinese government ownership — was stopped before it closed. A separate 30,000-acre agricultural holding has been divested…

Read the full story here.