Private Sector Intelligence Startup Cashing In on US-China Tensions
The American espionage business used to belong to governments. That is no longer the case. As US-China tensions reshape global trade and technology, a quiet intelligence revolution is happening in a suburban office park outside Salt Lake City.
A Startup Built for the China Threat
Strider Technologies scours open-source data to identify technologies most at risk of theft and the people who might be tempted to steal them. The company is the brainchild of twin brothers Greg and Eric Levesque. They founded it in 2019 with co-founder Mike Brown.
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, with offices in Washington DC, London, Tokyo, and Sydney, Strider now employs nearly 350 people. It operates in 16 countries and works with seven of the Top 10 Fortune 500 companies. Tech Advisor
The company’s timing could not have been better. National security officials say Chinese IP theft causes billions of dollars in losses each year. FBI Director Christopher Wray has stated that the Chinese government poses the biggest long-term threat to US economic and national security.
How the Private Sector Intelligence Startup Works
Mike Brown, Strider’s third founder and former CTO of Comscore Inc., led the development of Strider’s algorithms. He said they use techniques from the online advertising industry to identify targets of recruitment and correlate their activities across multiple large datasets.
The results have attracted serious government attention. One customer Bloomberg was able to identify is the US Air Force, which has used the technology since 2020 to vet suppliers for potentially problematic ties to China. In a statement, the Air Force confirmed that the Defence Department has contracted with Strider to build a more robust assessment of adversarial foreign ownership, control, and influence risk.
Strider positions its offering around AI-enabled geopolitical risk intelligence to help organisations coordinate responses to state-sponsored threats. The firm targets large enterprises and government customers with mission-critical security needs.
Greg Levesque does not mince words about the scale of the threat. “The espionage game has changed. Nation-states are now fully targeting industry, academia, and government,” he said. “It’s costing companies significant amounts of money, trust, and is actually undermining core innovation efforts in our country.”
Strider has raised $57 million from investors including DataTribe, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and Valour Equity Partners, at a valuation of more than $200 million. Company executives said they have dozens of Fortune 500 customers, including semiconductor, aerospace and defence, and oil and gas companies.
Annual estimates of US intellectual property theft range from $250 billion to $600 billion. Australian losses reached $12.5 billion in 2023 and 2024, and German estimates put damage from economic espionage at 300 billion euros per year. For a private sector intelligence startup, that is not a threat. That is a market.
