But the Google guys, they're in a class by themselves. And you can bet they are already doing something along the same lines.
From TechCrunch:
This former CIA analyst has signed big deals — and $40 million in new funding — for his internet monitoring startup
Tim Junio knew as a high school student that he wanted to join the CIA. He even wrote as much in his college application to Johns Hopkins University, where he would go on to nab both his undergraduate and master’s degrees before heading to the University of Pennsylvania to complete his PhD. (Hungry for more education, he then spent a year at Stanford on postdoctoral research.)
Along the way, his CIA dreams came true. Junio worked for the agency as an intern during his early college years, then in a part-time role. Eventually, he joining the outfit full time as an analyst for several years, where he was tasked with assessing foreign adversaries’ ability to do harm to U.S. interests.
Eventually, Junio began consulting for DARPA, where his career took a turn. While identifying weaknesses in the government’s digital framework, he met several like-minded PhD students with whom he formed a company. Called Qadium, the four-year-old, San Francisco-based company has seemingly been killing it since. Indeed, today, Qadium is announcing $40 million in Series B funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. Others in the round include TPG Growth and earlier backers New Enterprise Associates, Founders Fund, and Susa Ventures.
Qadium didn’t need the money, says Junio, who claims the company still has half the $20 million it raised last year in the bank. Given the types of customers Qadium has been signing up, however — CVS, PayPal, Capital One, Allergan — investors came knocking with ideas about how the company might move even faster.
One of these strategies involves hiring more salespeople. What will they be selling, collectively? An “automated global internet intelligence” platform, in a nutshell. Using technology that indexes every device on the public Internet every hour, Qadium uses the data to monitor the global internet for large organizations’ true network boundaries. In today’s day and age, they go well beyond the firewalls on which companies once relied, with risks that include shadow IT, misconfigurations in cloud hosting, lost devices owing to M&A events, and unauthorized or unmonitored IoT equipment....MORE
Taking it back a level, Qadium does what search companies do for the web by crawling web pages all the time, except Qadium is scouring not just the web but streaming video and streaming audio, as well as a whole chunk of the internet that’s machine-to-machine communications, so its customers have a full, real-time picture of every thing that could impact them. (The company leases space in data centers around the world so it can communicate with the internet in different geographies.)...
