Fivecast: An Australian SME providing world-leading open source intelligence solutions

Fivecast, based in Adelaide South Australia, is a world-leading provider of cutting-edge open source intelligence (OSINT) solutions with the mission to enable a safer world. Fivecast’s customers in national security, defence and law enforcement utilise their solutions to explore masses of digital data; gaining insights into threats which are critical in protecting global communities.

Founded by Dr. Brenton Cooper, Ross Buglak,  Duane Rivett and Dave Blockow in 2017, the idea for Fivecast was spun out of the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre (D2D CRC) which brought together some of the best and brightest research minds in AI and machine learning across industry, Government and Universities to tackle the big data challenges that faced Australian and global national security agencies.

“Fivecast was built from the ground up to specifically address big data challenges faced by the world’s most important organizations. We’re proud that the work initiated by the D2D CRC has been further developed by Fivecast and is now helping organizations both in Australia and the US uncover actionable insights to solve complex intelligence challenges of the utmost significance,” said Dr. Brenton Cooper, CEO of Fivecast.

Although only established formally for less than three years, in that time, Fivecast have enjoyed significant success including securing funding from the Commonwealth’s Accelerating Commercialisation grants in 2017 and in exporting their market-leading OSINT solution, Fivecast ONYX,  into the international market. 

“In a relatively short space of time, Fivecast has successfully established itself as a market leader in open-source intelligence in Australia and has established a presence in the US, already working with key customers in law enforcement and intelligence in that market. Our product roadmap includes new OSINT capabilities and use cases that will enable us to serve new markets and support continued growth,” mentioned Dr. Brenton Cooper.

There are two major elements of Fivecast’s key solution, Fivecast ONYX. Firstly,  targeted data collection enables masses of structured and unstructured data to be gathered across open source platforms, including text, images and video.  Secondly, AI-enabled analytics is applied to this data to quickly filter through the noise, identify the most risky data, uncover networks and analyse trends and changes across different risk elements.

“If a human was to analyse the data that’s collected, it would take weeks, at a minimum, to  uncover the critical information. By automating the data collection process and applying AI and machine learning to risk analysis, we’re reducing the time constraints of manual data analysis, removing the potential for human error and acting as a force multiplier for analyst teams that are often under-resourced,”  explained Dr. Brenton Cooper

In addition to helping overcome big data challenges, Fivecast’s AI enabled risk analytics are able to detect changes in behaviour, sentiment and emotion. This capability is of particular importance when their customers require a solution that identifies red flags in behaviours and changes in a person’s online activity. 

Thales and Fivecast’s relationship started around 18 months ago with Thales Australia’s Industry Engagement Unit (IEU) actively looking for innovative SMEs that fit well with Thales’ Group product portfolio, as part of the Australian Governments Global Supply Chain (GSC) Program. 

Fivecast are now embedded in Thales Australia’s own suite of digital intelligence tools which are in use by customers in Australia and overseas.  “We have found that the synergy of operational activity between the Thales intelligence Analysts’ capabilities combined with the use of Fivecast platforms, provides a unique curated capability for the Defence, National Security, Critical Infrastructure and law enforcement customers both locally in Australia and globally,” said Jason Legge, Thales Australia’s Director of Digital Innovation.

Read more on Fivecast here.