Arcturus

What they do

Arcturus is a risk intelligence company serving government and select corporate customers operating in Africa. Through the use of scaled reporting teams, Arcturus provides near real-time insights into emerging trends in low-intensity conflict, political violence and other social disturbances — all at a neighborhood level. Arcturus delivers decades of understanding dangerous events, logistical physical risk and personal safety at one’s fingertips. This helps streamline business operations, keep people informed, connected, and safe from harm through its platform Orion.

Why we invested

Arcturus’s innovative app Orion has great applications across several industries with large employee pools and can help companies to save on internal business operations related to Security. We expect the business model to be highly scalable and will result in lower operating costs (for security) for the markets Orion operates in.

The Founders

Ben Salander is the co-founder of Arcturus where he leads the development of techniques for distributed, physical data collection in complex geographies. To date, governments and businesses have leveraged these capabilities to counter organized crime, build safer communities, and evacuate war zones.

Before Arcturus, Ben co-founded and operated Asio Security — a cybersecurity firm serving critical infrastructure clients on the American east coast. He studied at Harvard and MIT before dropping out to found his first company.

Michael Cipolla is the co-founder and CTO of Arcturus where he leads the firm’s software and machine learning teams. Michael’s work has been directly cited as saving dozens of lives and operationalizing decades of sophisticated academic and government research.

Michael is a software engineer and cybersecurity researcher. Before Arcturus, he and Ben founded an ethical hacking company to provide cybersecurity solutions and consulting to professional services firms in Boston. Michael studied at the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out after his second year.