Freethink: “Strider…has developed exceptional capabilities”

Strider CEO and Co-Founder Greg Levesque spoke to Ben Upton at Freethink about how technology has transformed private sector intelligence efforts. The rise of open-source data and AI have empowered private sector organizations to take control of their own security against state-sponsored threats—getting better information at quicker speeds than they would have been able to get from the government.

Keep reading for a brief excerpt about Strider’s capabilities:

With AI and open data, some private intelligence vendors can now outperform government agencies.

Freethink

By: Ben Upton | March 28, 2025

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Strider Technologies, based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, has developed exceptional capabilities by applying AI to the burdensome task of risk profiling, the process of determining who might want to steal company secrets and how they typically do it so that a firm can better protect its most vulnerable assets and staff.

“We’re building, literally, a digital twin of the global economy, down to the individual level: all of the corporate actors, financial flows, trade flows,” Greg Levesque, Strider’s CEO and co-founder, told Freethink. “We can spin up a digital twin of any organization in the entire world, process all of that, and then run all our analytics through their organization to identify risk and opportunities, without the company giving us any data or access to their network.”

To avoid its AI cooking up imaginary threats based on probabilities alone, Strider’s model uses an approach called document validation. It corroborates an AI model’s response using the original source material, which is also served to the analyst for verification.

“Frankly, I don’t really care if so-and-so went for coffee with so-and-so,” Levesque, who worked in public sector intelligence before founding Strider in 2019, told Freethink. “What I do care [about] is did they get cash? Did they sign a contract? I want something tangible that, within a rule of law-based system, which we all live in and which all of our corporate customers live in, they can act on.”

Levesque said his firm’s capabilities are only possible because of the digitization of organizations over the past decade, a process that was accelerated when most were forced into remote work by the COVID-19 pandemic. The services built out of the resulting AI models are valuable enough that Strider now counts seven of the 10 largest US companies by revenue among its clients, according to Levesque.

He says Strider is also helping to vet every applicant to the US Department of Defense’s fund for small business research, which pays out more than $1 billion a year: “It was taking them 10 months to do a vetting of just one cohort in the program. We built a tool to do it in 10 hours.”

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Full article available on Freethink.