Into the Future of Intelligence with Recorded Future

Clients, colleagues, partners, and friends — welcome to 2025! The year 2024 certainly was a year to remember. Recorded Future is now by far the world’s largest intelligence company, significantly bigger than any competitor in revenues, with 1,000 intelligence professionals on the team serving thousands of customers worldwide. We deliver critical intelligence capabilities to thousand of companies in many industries as well as some 50 governments around the world among the West, its Allies, and its Friends. And we remain 100% focused on intelligence and making it easily actionable, nothing else.

While doing this we were acquired by Mastercard. We signed the definitive agreement in September and we closed our transaction on December 20th. Entrepreneurs building companies should be ultra focused on one single thing - build a great product and a great company with a great team, all for the customer. Yet there comes a moment when you need to make a profound choice. When Mastercard reached out to us it quickly became clear that this would be a fantastic combination that would surprise some, yet offer limitless potential. Mastercard has a long history of building insights and intelligence from data (e.g. fraud prevention and business insights) and it was immediately evident that Mastercard would be a great long term home for Recorded Future, as well as a strong business partner. And now we’re off to the races - you will see some quite exciting things shipping soon!

Last year I commented that our world was at peak uncertainty following the horrendous terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel. In hindsight, I was wrong. It was not anywhere near peak uncertainty. Twelve months later North Korea has signed a NATO-like alliance with Russia and is actively involved in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with thousands of troops deployed to the front lines; most Hezbollah leaders are dead; most Hamas leaders are dead; the Syrian dictator has fled to Moscow, and Russia are perhaps abandoning its bases in Syria. Meanwhile, China has penetrated telecommunications networks across much of the free world, and the global ransomware epidemic continues. The differences between the West and its adversaries have not been more stark in generations. The role of intelligence is more important than ever.

At the same time we’re living in an era of Artificial Intelligence that promises enormous benefits to the nations winning the race. America has a significant advantage right now, yet it is too early to determine who eventually wins - China will not let this happen without taking the gloves off. Companies are racing to build AI chips, fundamental AI models, AI infrastructure for enterprises, as well as novel applications built on AI. Countries are racing to be the place for AI R&D, attracting the best AI researchers, and aiming to be the smartest at deploying AI at national level - whether in Military, Education or… Intelligence! To be part of this race is incredibly exciting to us.

As builders of the world's leading Threat Intelligence platform that utilizes Artificial Intelligence in many, many ways (from entity extraction to report writing to emerging intelligence agents) we also realize the utmost importance of protecting Artificial Intelligence. We need to keep AI safe in itself; we need to protect the intellectual property behind our AI so it doesn’t fall into the hands of our adversaries; and we need to make sure our AI is robust enough to combat the adversarial use of AI in disinformation, network operations and elsewhere. These are not trivial challenges, yet there is incredible value to be created.

At Recorded Future we love spending time with our customers. Every fall we hold our Predict conferences in Washington DC, London, Singapore, and Tokyo - and we get to spend a lot of time with you, as well as listening to incredible speakers from our customers, partners, and governments. This year we went to the next level with speakers from the White House, the NSA, the British government, and former British Prime Minister Lord Cameron - as well as many incredible enterprise customers and colleagues. Quite thrilling!

Throughout the year the cyber trend that stood out beyond everything else was ransomware. We worked incredibly hard at applying our intelligence to stop ransomware. We launched our new Ransomware Risk Profile that aggregates everything Recorded Future knows about ransomware in one place, all personalized for you as a client - pulling together real time data collection from malware, dark web, network intelligence, identity and other sources with Insikt research and unique visualizations.

The team at Recorded Future is truly thrilled about the opportunity in front of us, and what our new collaboration with Mastercard promises. We will deliver amazing insights, products, and intelligence to you all. Likewise, notwithstanding the geopolitical risks, we live in an incredible time to develop intelligence and technology. Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine fame summarizes this very well below.?

I think you can tell that I am very excited. Hope to see you in person in 2025!

C