Interview with KIVU — The Future of Data Intelligence

Last week we had the chance to visit KIVU at their office in Vienna. KIVU’s product is an easy to use, end to end network analysis platform, developed by a team with an extensive background in the domain of counter terrorism and open source intelligence. We already introduced this company in my previous blog post and this time we will provide you some further information about their business and use cases.

We popped right into their daily stand-up meeting, which they use as a technique for communication, updates and organization. After a short introduction to their current project, we had the change to sit down with Daniela Klimpfinger, who has a background in Geoinformation science and is responsible for case studies, use case development and sales.

What is KIVU?

KIVU is a tool for complex network analysis. Nowadays, terrorists are successfully radicalizing and recruiting via social media, while governments struggle with the increasing data volumes they have to deal with. KIVU provides a solution for this issue: Customers can subscribe to KIVU’s proprietary hosted analytical platform, which enables them to access real-time data and analysis of their observed persons in a certain social-media network. The process is the following: Customers can create new and explore existing network, by adding their target persons into the KIVU platform. Next, KIVU collects and analyses the information of the key persons social media networks and illustrates connections and also discovers further relevant key persons. KIVU is saving critical time for counter- terrorism analysts. They require accuracy about harness connections within a network in order for significant decisions, which can save lives. Further, KIVU provides new insights on threats, trends and patterns in social networks without the customer having to spend huge resources on customization or hiring analytics specialists.

How is the team of KIVU structured?

KIVU has an excellent team with background in counterterrorism, mathematics, data analytics and data science. Our team consists of back end developers, here in Vienna. Our whole front end team is located in Kiev and we also have our data analyst there. Management, product management, administration and sales are also located in Vienna. It’s extremely hard to find developers in Vienna, therefore we are always looking out for potentials.

How do you secure improvements in the software of KIVU?

Every two weeks we release an updated version of our product which contains improvements and/or new features. In this time frame our team is fixing bugs, adding new technical function and making the platform running more smoothly. This release trail leads to a continuous improvement.

KIVU can also be used as a marketing analytics tool. How has this new use case emerged next to the initial use case of terroristic network analysis?

The initial use case of KIVU was to analyze criminal online networks in order to find out key people in the spread of propaganda of terroristic organizations. These persons are also so called “influencers”. We discover that the workflow in the marketing use case is similar, as there are also people using their social networks to influence their audience. Of course, the thematic of the context is completely different, but the process of spreading the message is similar. What’s important in both use cases are the “key influencer” and their network. Further, the software is not analyzing the content, it focuses on the relations and connections within persons in a network.

Could you further explain this marketing analytics use case?

The number of followers and likes are not enough to represent a person’s importance and influence in a marketing context. KIVU provides a more reliable indicator! Let’s view an example of a promotion of a travel destination. A marketing agency has to find the persons with the most influence on travel-interested people in Germany. They already have a list of 10 travel influencers and want to analyze their network. In this short video you can see the process of network analysis:

What were your biggest achievements so far?

Since KIVU was founded in 2016, we developed its core initial technologies, including patentable innovations. In 2017 we raised a seed round of 1,8M EUR. We could then increase our team size and further develop and improve our product. The minimum viable product was finished in May 2018 and our first official release was in November 2018. In February 2019 we closed our first customer contract and also closed the first stage of the SBIR grant program with the US Air Force.

What are KIVU´s next steps?

In the near future it is all about customer validation and our two co-developments with security agencies. Further, we have also started to work on a new timeline feature which will continue until late summer 2019. We are also expanding in the influencer marketing domain. We are currently preparing for Series A round to validate further use cases in the financial industry, be rooted within the security market, scale and expand within Europe!

Stay tuned and visit KIVU’s website at kivu.tech!!

See you next time with an introduction to our other portfolio companies :-)