(Bloomberg) — Utah Department of Public Safety investigators were ‘stuck.’
They were looking at an inconspicuous motor sports track about 40 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and couldn’t figure out who really owned it.
It was an important question: In 2023, Utah joined the group of states that banned US adversaries — including China, Iran, North Korea and Russia — from buying land, and the park’s trails were within sight of a US military ammunition depot.
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Utah officials used corporate and labor records to learn more about the park’s owners, a company called Mitime Utah Investment LLC. Its top executives had US passports, but the trail stopped there. Officials then turned to Strider Technologies, a Utah-based company that has spent nearly a decade building a private-sector version of what intelligence agencies do for nation states.
Using Strider’s platform — which evaluates billions of public documents, corporate records, foreign trade data and files in other languages — investigators traced Mitime’s corporate structure to entities with direct contracts and personnel ties to China’s government and military.
“This generated an overwhelming amount of information,” said Tanner Jensen, head of the department.
The Strider discovery highlighted the growing importance of private investigations as the Trump administration accelerates its strategy to make the US less economically dependent on the world’s second-largest economy. States have followed suit with their own tightenings on China.
It’s an opportune time for Strider, which launched its first “agent” AI feature on Thursday. The company already has small contracts with the US Air Force, as well as state governments and NATO, and a growing list of former international intelligence directors on its staff.
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This clash between global capital and national security has also created a new market category: the commercialization of counterintelligence in the areas of supply chain, intellectual property theft, and insider risk. And this market is emerging amid growing concern about the power of AI technology and the risks linked to the responsible use of public data and privacy violations.
The business of tracking state actors—mapping their shell companies, identifying their agents, tracking their acquisition of foreign technology—has traditionally been conducted exclusively by government intelligence agencies, funded by taxpayers and operating under classified mandates.
What they knew, for the most part, they could not share. What they couldn’t share, the private sector couldn’t use. Strider has created a private, high-margin business on top of what was previously a public function and put that capability within reach of any organization that can afford the subscription. In the case of the US Air Force, the value exceeded US$8 million.
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What Strider has built, by its own description, is “a digital twin of the industrial world down to the people level” — current and former employees of thousands of organizations, their suppliers, their technologies, their business relationships, all mapped continuously from public sources, in multiple languages.
In the case of NATO, for example, the company operates in risk assessment, strategic intelligence and economic security capabilities, said an alliance spokesperson. NATO did not reveal the size of the Strider contract.
Strider’s presence in such sensitive areas raises questions about what would happen in the event of a significant breach, hostile takeover or lawsuit in a jurisdiction where the company operates but whose government is among those it monitors.
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“It’s a very powerful way to conduct widespread surveillance, and what concerns me specifically is that the general public has no idea what data is collected about them for these purposes, nor how to defend against it,” said Jennifer King, a data privacy researcher at Stanford, commenting on the data collection business.
CEO Greg Levesque said the founding team assumed that the platform’s success would attract risk and structured the company’s architecture around that premise: redundancy, encryption and — crucially — a “zero touch” model, which means Strider does not ingest or store customer data.
The company’s systems, methodologies and terms of use, he said, were designed to operate within established legal frameworks and prioritize accuracy, transparency and responsible use of data. “Our analysis is based on verifiable, open-source information and provides risk signals — not automated conclusions — to support informed decision-making.”
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The company’s post-Series C valuation, completed in September 2024, was $450 million. Since this round, Levesque said that the company has almost tripled revenue and is studying new funding. Strider currently operates in 16 countries; Greg’s twin brother Eric — who is chairman and co-founder — is based in London. Greg Levesque, who won’t reveal client names but says the company serves eight of the top ten Fortune 500 companies, declined to comment on the specific valuation.
The company has competitors. Some, like Sayari, Datenna and Exiger, focus on supply chain risk; others, like Recorded Future and Lexis, target intellectual property theft.
Strider does both, plus strategic intelligence — something difficult for any rival to replicate, said Blake Modersitzki of Pelion Ventures, who led the Series C and sits on Strider’s board.
Laura Galante, a former senior U.S. intelligence official with extensive experience tracking state-sponsored information operations, said the market will continue to expand regardless of who serves it. “We are seeing a major shift, where geopolitical competition is playing out across private sector networks and against physical corporate assets,” he said. “Most companies understand this exposure, but do not yet have concrete ways to manage or govern it across lines of business, suppliers and geographies.”
In a demonstration, Levesque ran a live query across Strider’s entire dataset: How are US-made semiconductors making their way into Russian and Iranian drone programs despite post-2022 sanctions? The system ran for about two minutes, searching databases of military purchases in third countries and producing a map of approximately 33,000 shipments, valued at around US$240 million. It identified post-sanctions trade diversion routes passing through Shenzhen and Hong Kong and ranked component suppliers by volume — with major chipmakers appearing in the results. Computational cost: less than US$20.
Whether Strider has correctly identified the size of the gap it is filling — and whether its platform actually closes it or just narrows it — will be answered over time. The Utah land cases are among the clearest examples of measurable outcome. The more difficult claim, that “agent” AI can provide reliable, actionable intelligence at enterprise scale, has yet to be tested in a real environment.
Leah Siskind, who studies the adversarial use of artificial intelligence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says transparency around AI systems is critical. The White House announced, in July last year, the creation of a center that, among other functions, should share information and intelligence on threats.
“There is no deadline for this to happen, and we already needed it yesterday,” she said. In the case of companies like Strider that are deploying agent AI, “there is huge potential for amazing work, but also a lot of risk.”
In Utah, Tanner Jensen is waiting for the state legislature to finalize budget allocations so his department can license Strider on an ongoing basis.
The race track was sold weeks ago to an American company. The pending sale of land near Provo airport — traced via Strider’s system to substantial Chinese government ownership — was blocked before completion. Another agricultural area of 30 thousand acres has already been disinvested.
Mitime Utah Investment LLC is a subsidiary of Geely Holding Group, headquartered in Zhejiang, China. Emails sent to the company and requests for comment from Mitime executives via LinkedIn were not responded to.
To contact the author of this article:
Jamie Tarabay, in Washington, e-mail recipient
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