A dark data startup you haven’t heard of is spilling secrets to Starbucks, McDonald’s

Photo credit: Pexels.

There’s a startup in India quietly crunching enormous amounts of dark data. Quantta Analytics is digesting unstructured data – text messages, documents, email, video and audio files, and still images. It also ingests stuff from the deep web – everything online that is not indexed by search engines, including anonymous, inaccessible sites known as the “dark web,” and spilling its secrets to about a hundred entities paying for it.

You aren’t likely to have heard of Quantta as even its website says too little. The site almost makes the company look like some kind of family-run business with siblings Ritesh Bawri, Malvika Bawri, and Vinay Bawri, who used to run a multi-million dollar cement company, at the helm.

The rest of Quantta’s 20-member team – including mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers from MIT, Harvard University, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), and Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), according to the founders – stay behind the veil. They are using computer systems modeled on the human brain and nervous system – neural networks – to understand and interpret dark data while it’s being spewed out – in real time – and combining it with behavioral psychology to decipher and predict human behavior.

The deep web is at least 500 times larger than the surface web.

For now, it is mostly large financial institutions like State Bank of India (SBI), Kotak, and Fullerton paying Quantta for its intelligence. There are some from other industries like retail, hospitality, healthcare, energy, and food as well – like McDonald’s and Starbucks. But in the future, Indian intelligence agencies could pay Quantta for aid in covert operations. It is, after all, modeled after the secretive data giant in the US Palantir, according to founder Ritesh Bawri.

Palantir has been lending tech muscle to intelligence outfits like the CIA, Homeland Security, military clients, police departments, and large financial institutions in the US. The CIA was an early investor in the company, founded in 2004 by a group of investors and technologists including Peter Thiel. Unconfirmed reports have said Palantir’s technology was used in the intelligence operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

Bawri gives me an example of what Quantta can do: “Imagine a voice conversation taking places between me and my Pakistani handler. I am chatting with him using an unregistered device and he is giving me instructions on what to do, discussing terror activities. In a perfect world, you should be able to suck in that conversation, transcribe it into text on top of which you can do a keyword search and say what these guys were talking about.”

A remotely operated underwater vehicle is about to capture “Oliver,” an octopus floating just a few feet away. Photo credit: The Hidden Ocean, Arctic 2005 Exploration.

“The use-cases for their [Quantta’s] product are limitless,” says Rohan Malhotra, co-founder of Investopad, who introduced the startup to me.

Quantta recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from unnamed investors – “they are all renowned entrepreneurs and investors from across India and Silicon Valley,” Bawri says. This was a seed round of external funding for Quantta, which the Bawri siblings were bootstrapping since 2014.

A lottery jackpot

A Google search on any topic would give just 0.03 percent of the information that exists online. That’s because its search engine cannot access the deep web – a place hidden behind paywalls you can access only with passwords and special software. The deep web is at least 500 times larger than the surface web – the stuff most of us use every day.

Google throws up about 16 percent of the surface web, according to a study published in Nature. Popular Science bills it “like fishing in the top two feet of the ocean—you miss the virtual Mariana Trench below.”

The glue

I am not Amazon