Ukrainian OSINT company Artellence receives funding from Google

Ukrainian IT company Artellence, which is engaged in OSINT projects, has received funding from Google.

“This was announced at the IT Arena technology conference in Lviv,” the Vector publication said.

At the event, it was announced that 24 Ukrainian startups had received funding from the Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund.

The list includes Artellence, which has developed the BigDataPeople product for defense organizations and is a member of the Brave1 cluster.

BigDataPeople helps security services to solve the problems of analyzing digital traces.

Artellence has also developed its own face recognition system, built NLP (natural language processing) algorithms for analyzing text content, and created models for structuring large heterogeneous data.

The company’s solutions, in particular, help identify people who are prone to separatism.

“Our algorithm analyzes the most popular social networks in Ukraine. The most informative in this regard are social networks of Russian origin: such information is not subject to censorship and deletion. We look at data for a long period of time, if possible. We analyze subscriptions, likes, comments, and posts,” said Volodymyr Lozovyi, founder of Artellence.

At the first stage, the data is prepared and cleaned. A machine learning algorithm evaluates billions of posts and comments and identifies those that may be related to separatism.

Pages are also marked in a similar way if they may indicate separatist views of their users.

At the second stage, the cleaned data is evaluated by a different algorithm. It reaches a clearer verdict: it determines the likelihood that a person may be interested in separatist views.

“One of our SaaS products is BigDataPeople. It is used by B2B salespeople, marketers, recruiters, and security services. It is important for them to understand whether a person has separatist interests when checking a candidate for a job,” said the company’s founder.

He adds that their product only helps to find suspicious information and give a preliminary assessment. The final decision is made by a security officer.

As part of the Google program, Artellence will receive $100,000 in direct funding and mentoring support from Google and 1991 Accelerator.

In addition, initiatives can receive up to $350 thousand in Google Cloud loans to expand their business.

As previously reported, a large Russian network of profiles created to discredit the Territorial Centers of Recruitment, Social Support and Mobilization in Ukraine was discovered on TikTok.