Pentagon awards $318M contract for Dataminr alerting services technology
Dataminr won a $318 million contract from the Defense Department for AI-powered situational awareness technology to support the A2 Publicly Available Information Alerting program.
The deal was announced Thursday evening. It was a competitive acquisition, and eight offers were received, according to the Pentagon.
“This contract provides situational awareness, force protection, and indications and warnings on global events,” per the DOD announcement. Work covered by the deal is expected to be completed by June 25, 2031.
The award was issued by the Air Force, but the capability is expected to scale across the DOD.
In a solicitation released earlier this year, the Air Force noted that it was seeking a “commercially-available enterprise license subscription that leverages a variety of publicly available information sources, evaluates content to detect emerging events as they are developing, and pushes alerts to users based on user-defined areas and topics of interest, amongst other requirements.”
The technology “must be capable of distributing alerts in near real-time via email, application programming interface (API), web-based application, and mobile platforms,” officials added, noting that a vendor’s solution must be “able to scale to a DoW enterprise capability, and keep pace with developments and standards within the commercial industry sector.” (DoW is an acronym that refers to the Department of War, which is the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.)
In a press release issued Wednesday, Dataminr provided details about its AI-powered First Alert Advanced capability and highlighted the $318 million Pentagon contract award.
The tool can be applied across all the military services, unified combatant and operational commands, per the press release.
“Our landmark $318 million DOW contract award for First Alert solidifies Dataminr’s position as the real-time alerting backbone of the U.S. military for the next half-decade. With today’s launch of First Alert Advanced, Dataminr is now fundamentally transforming our category with Autonomous Real-Time Intelligence, equipping defense and government organizations with unmatched AI-powered real-time decision advantage,” Ted Bailey, the company’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.
According to the press release, the firm’s AI agents and models that are part of the First Alert Advanced platform can autonomously scan the universe of publicly available information for “corroborating data” as events unfold, continuously describe an event’s evolution and its potential impact on customers, synthesize “user-relevant real-time event context,” and predict how an event may unfold “over the coming hours” based on historical event patterns.
Dataminr’s tech uses a slew of purpose-built, specialized large language models trained on historical event data.
Other AI tools offered by the platform include an agent that interacts with users to create and refine watchlist settings, a real-time brief builder, custom alerts related to “hyperlocal and hyperspecific” topics of interest, a historical search feature, and advanced API, according to the company.
There’s also a new app on Palantir’s Foundry Marketplace that “synthesizes and contextualizes First Alert’s Autonomous Real-Time Intelligence with government data layers in Palantir Foundry, enabling new agentic workflows and contextual analytics,” according to the Dataminr press release.
