Why we invested in Alethea

The truth is out there

By Ted Schlein, Co-founder and General Partner

The truth is out there. The question is does anyone care? Mis/dis/mal-information has become an epidemic, but it’s not obvious that anyone has an appetite for accurate information.

We believe that if you are a major corporation today, you want to make decisions based on accurate and truthful information, and you want to make sure that your customers, shareholders, and talent have accurate information about you. For example, any organization should want to understand if some new meme is trending that they have to pay attention to.

As it turns out, disinformation is just another form of malware – and we have been combating malware for over 30 years now.

The difference is that this form of malware has a seemingly positive intent, and it disguises its payload. It is, in fact, more insidious than any malware that we have dealt with in modern society. While malware is historically contained to attacking a company’s systems, this new threat is pervasive and can have catastrophic effects.

That’s where Alethea comes in. Alethea was started with one goal in mind: show us what we should care about in the online world that we might not know about.

Alethea helps you find topics before they start trending to avoid a deleterious effect on your organization. The company also helps you determine what you should pay attention to and what you can ignore because no one else is paying attention.

Unfortunately in today’s world, we are at the whims of algorithms that can determine whether something is topical or not. Nefarious forces have figured out how to manipulate these algorithms to their advantage. Now, the ability to use our open democracy and widely adopted infrastructure against our society is this generation’s defensive challenge.

Alethea has developed a solution to help understand and combat this insidious and complicated malware. They believe accurate information is not optional. At Ballistic, we agree, which is why our newest investment is in Alethea.