CIA's computer business

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Technology entrepreneur Neil Senturia got an unexpected phone call one day from a man working for the CIA.

When a friend asked how it happened, Senturia joked: "They're the CIA. They find anything they want."

Actually, the CIA has not always had the easiest time finding what it needs from the fast-moving world of technology. Which is why it launched three years ago a nonprofit venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

Since Sept. 11, the unit's mission of investing in up-and-coming technologies has become more urgent. Fortunately for In-Q-Tel's 40 employees in Menlo Park and Arlington, Va., hundreds of tech companies have come calling.

The CIA can give an obscure technology a large-scale testing ground, an early entry into government and some valuable credibility.

"If it's good enough for an organization like the agency, heck, it's good enough for most large corporations," said Nimish Mehta, the head of Stratify Inc., which got several million dollars in funding from In-Q-Tel last year.

Finding data

Stratify is among a handful of companies that can find important tidbits of "unstructured data" -- information scattered throughout organizations in word-processing files, e-mails and databases, for example -- and put them together in a way that makes sense.

The technology is of particular interest to the CIA because the agency is under increasing pressure to process piles of intelligence information more quickly.

To that end, In-Q-Tel invested $1 million in November in Tacit Knowledge Systems Inc. of Palo Alto, which scans e-mail to determine who in an organization has potentially insightful expertise someone else should know about.Senturia's San Diego-based Mohomine Inc., which also attracted an In-Q-Tel investment of at least $1 million last year, makes software that culls and categorizes information spread across various kinds of documents -- even in foreign languages.

Working with languages

Mohomine, Stratify and Cincinnati-based Intelliseek Inc. are helping the CIA soup up its Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which monitors overseas radio, newspaper and Internet reports.

"Our mission is to go after technologies that are going to get to market anyway," said Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel's chief executive. "We want to get there ahead of time. We want to get there early."

In-Q-Tel gets about $30 million per year to spend on investments and technology analysis; any profits must be plowed back into operations.

It has purchased technology from about two dozen companies and taken equity stakes in at least 13. Most recently, In-Q-Tel agreed to license e-mail collaboration software from Zaplet Inc. and a multi-language Internet search system from Northern Light.

Many In-Q-Tel employees have no CIA or government experience, including Louie, 41, a former video game developer who created the Falcon computer flight simulator and first published the enormously addictive game Tetris in the United States.

Louie and his team often get tipped to new technologies by other venture capitalists looking to team up. They also consult regularly with researchers at national laboratories and big companies.

"They are so sophisticated in their vetting of technology that they put us through a process that was really rigorous," said David Gilmour, head of Tacit Knowledge Systems. "We inherited a huge technical resource that's on our side and is available with a phone call."

Meaning of "Q"

The "Q" in In-Q-Tel is a reference to the gadget guru who outfitted James Bond with tiny homing beacons and ejecting car seats. The technologies In-Q-Tel has unearthed for the feds are less cinematic, but pioneering nonetheless.

A sampling:

Browse3D Corp. of Northern Virginia can show Web surfers several pages at once in virtual "rooms" that reveal what lies behind links.

Graviton Inc. of La Jolla makes networks of tiny sensors that communicate with each other and relay information to a user-friendly computer interface -- "a nervous system for the engineered world," said Graviton's top engineer, Larry Goldstein.

For now, potential customers include convenience stores that need to monitor their refrigeration units. The sensors could someday be used to detect explosives or chemical or biological agents.

SafeWeb Inc. of Emeryville recently shut down a free service that let Internet users bypass Web censorship by governments and corporations. But the company is pressing ahead with a commercial version.

This winter, the CIA plans to begin testing the product, which would let analysts visit foreign Web sites without leaving any trace they came from cia.gov.

"Everybody's very excited about what In-Q-Tel has brought," said Thomas Benjamin, director of a team of 13 CIA officials who work with In-Q-Tel to determine what the agency needs. "It's definitely improved our insight and reach into those technologies that probably would have eluded us."