Instant Insight: Why We Invested in TerraEchos

Timing is everything. Whether telling a joke, starting a company—or defeating cyber threats against a country’s infrastructure or company’s assets—timing is the crucial factor.

TerraEchos has harnessed the power of time and the insights of big data to create the world’s leading analytics solution for time-critical threat detection. Their Kairos™ appliance not only collects massive amounts of live data (structured and unstructured), but also analyzes and correlates the data in real time, then provides instant insight, giving customers the time to anticipate and act. The result: data-driven insight connected to mission timeliness like never before.

The big data analytics space has been of interest to us at True for a while now—and while we have seen the rapid growth of companies collecting and storing big data, TerraEchos is the first to apply big data analytics, in real time, to cyber-security in both commercial and government sectors. Also intriguing is TerraEchos’ use of off-the-shelf IBM hardware to implement Kairos, effectively making it a software solution and extremely cost-efficient compared to the expensive, customized hardware being used by other big data companies. The innovation and forethought shown by Founder Alex Philp and President Bill Hartman are truly impressive, and we jumped at the chance to work with them.

We first met Bill through Trevor Loy at Flywheel Ventures, where Bill was serving as Entrepreneur in Residence. When Alex, who created the Kairos technology, sought funding from Flywheel, Bill joined him as President and COO. Together, Bill and Alex have built TerraEchos into an award-winning, global leader in real-time analytics, and we are happy to join Flywheel in supporting their continued success.

The real-world applications for the Kairos solution are vast—locating a bomb, stopping a cyber virus, evacuating citizens ahead of a storm, or steering the drill bit of a gas rig thousands of feet under bedrock. The possibilities are literally endless. Not surprisingly, the Department of Defense and other U.S. Government agencies have shown significant interest in TerraEchos. Our country’s intelligence community faces time-critical problems that will be transformed by Kairos’ ability to simultaneously collect data from thousands of seemingly unrelated sources and put them in situational context with time, space and intent. As I said, timing is everything, and it could not be a more exciting time for True to partner with this groundbreaking company.