Member Article

Durham military officer turned entrepreneur crowdfunds intriguing intelligence platform

A former military intelligence officer has created an online security, intelligence, and risk platform, based from County Durham.

Michael McCabe, founder of Intelligence Fusion, has successfully raised £22,500 in a pre-seed funding round, on equity crowdfunding and syndication platform, GrowthFunders, from online angels and a Venture Capital fund.

Intelligence Fusion connects professionals from across multiple sectors and countries, on one interface, allowing them to securely share business intelligence, as well as tactical, operational and strategic information.

The platform was founded by Michael McCabe, who has a strong background in military intelligence. Michael served five years with the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, during which time he gained significant experience conducting Counterintelligence and Operational Intelligence, both in the UK and across the Middle East.

After leaving the military in 2009, Michael joined the private sector, where his role involved providing intelligence support and risk management to the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ reconstruction efforts in western Iraq. He helped manage projects worth in excess of $100m on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense and planned and risk-mitigated for over 800 successful close protection missions in a hostile environment.

Michael Dickens, Fund Manager at Rivers Capital Partners, said: “Intelligence Fusion is an innovative, disruptive business lead by a go-getting entrepreneur. It is exactly what we look for in an investment opportunity.

“One of the main aims of the fund is to stimulate angel investment activity into the North East. So we are pleased to complete a funding round with GrowthFunders, a groundbreaking North East based online angel investing platform.”

Michael McCabe, Founder, Intelligence Fusion: “The Intelligence Fusion platform can help support any business which has intelligence requirements relating to threats and risks, including banks looking for travel security information, shipping companies facing threats from piracy, and the extraction sector with operations in non-permissive environments or high risk locations.”

Craig Peterson, co-founder and COO of Growth Capital Ventures, said: “It’s fantastic to see Intelligence Fusion harnessing the power of the crowd to fund their platform, which will in turn, crowdsource intelligence information from and for a number of specific markets.

“Enabling businesses, who operate in hostile environments and who understand and manage risks, to be monitored by military intelligence personnel is an interesting prospect.”