KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Danti, an AI startup that developed a search engine for Earth data, is gaining users within the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, said the company’s founder and CEO Jesse Kallman.
Danti, based in Atlanta, announced last week it secured $5 million in seed funding, an investment led by venture capital firm Shield Capital, which focuses on artificial intelligence and defense technologies. This is Shield Capital’s first investment in Danti.
The company’s search engine leverages artificial intelligence to unlock insights from a vast array of Earth observation data. This includes satellite imagery, drone footage, social media information, and government databases.
Users can ask questions in plain English and receive comprehensive answers that combine data points from all sources. This can be helpful for a wide range of users, from insurance underwriters assessing risk to military analysts tracking troop movements
“There is a massive data overload, distribution, and knowledge gap problem that companies and governments alike are facing,” said Kallman.
By leveraging AI and natural language processing, users of any skill level can get answers in a matter of seconds, he said.
David Rothzeid, vice president of Shield Capital, said harnessing data across multiple sources is a challenge for most industries. “Danti’s large language models enable a new kind of search engine that has the potential to democratize the world’s massive amounts of data.”
Defense and intelligence analysts are using Danti’s engine to “connect large, very distributed datasets that live across government servers, commercial servers, the open Internet, and allow users to use all of that information as if it were all in the same place, all structured the same way. And they can interact with it, conversationally,” Kallman said.
“You can’t do this with ChatGPT,” Kallman said of the popular chatbot. “We’ve adapted language model infrastructure that’s been specifically tuned and trained for this kind of information,” he said. “The U.S. government has already procured quite a lot of this geospatial intelligence content for their benefit. The question is, do they have access to it? Do they know about it?”