IC venture arm backs automation, cloud security tech firms

In-Q-Tel -- the intelligence community’s venture capital arm -- this week disclosed another pair of investments in commercial technology outfits to determine how those companies’ offerings can be deployed to defense and IC agencies.

In-Q-Tel’s backing of Outlier seeks to evaluate the ability of that firm’s automated business analysis platform for use in cloud-based and on-premise data sets used by agencies.

Outlier’s product is seen as a tool agencies can leverage for artificial intelligence applications in order to analyze large amounts of data each day and also see patterns and changes, according to a release.

The second investment announced by In-Q-Tel is in Sysdig, a visibility and security company that built its offering to give users insight and control as they move into modern cloud-based IT environments.

In-Q-Tel views Sysdig’s product as potentially helping agencies identify vulnerabilities, enforce compliance, and monitor application and service performance.

Defense and intelligence agencies are seeking to improve the health and risk posture of their environments, reduce costs of operations, detect vulnerabilities and prevent attacks.