Justice: A CEO’s promise to bring integrity to big data

Jason Crab­tree didn’t expect to start his busi­ness. A West Point grad­u­ate and First Cap­tain of the US Mil­i­tary Academy’s Corps of Cadets, he always planned to serve his coun­try in a mil­i­tary career. Deeply moved by the 9/11 attacks, he elect­ed to study civ­il engi­neer­ing at the US Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my. He was com­mis­sioned into the infantry and saw dec­o­rat­ed ser­vice in Afghanistan, before being sum­moned to work for the Com­mand­ing Gen­er­al of US Army Cyber Com­mand.

Mr Crabtree’s exper­tise cen­tres on the role that cyber­se­cu­ri­ty plays in crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture: for exam­ple, pow­er grids, bank­ing sys­tems, and oth­er plat­forms and resources that sup­port our com­mu­ni­ties. He always thought he would focus on this work through his mil­i­tary ser­vice. How­ev­er, he began to realise that he couldn’t achieve what he want­ed with­in exist­ing insti­tu­tions – mil­i­tary or oth­er­wise.

Luck­i­ly, he wasn’t alone. His future co-founder and close friend from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, Dr Andrew Sell­ers – a US Air Force (USAF) vet­er­an who served in Iraq and became chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at the USAF Acad­e­my – found him­self in much the same impasse.

“I actu­al­ly didn’t antic­i­pate leav­ing mil­i­tary ser­vice. In fact, some­times I’m still sur­prised that it hap­pened,” Mr Crab­tree says. “But Andrew and I got to the point where we didn’t think that we could ever build what was miss­ing inside the insti­tu­tions that we were a part of.” 

Data Ambitions

So what was their ambi­tion? Noth­ing less than con­ceiv­ing and build­ing the tools to secure com­plex mod­ern enter­pris­es and empow­er them to scal­ably inter­act with diverse sources of data.

Data is more prized than ever, but it can be used for good or ill. Pre­vent­ing a cyber­at­tack on a glob­al bank? Great. Elec­tion manip­u­la­tion? Down­right scary. The pair’s aim, accord­ing to Mr Crab­tree, was devel­op­ing “a source of truth to fig­ure out indi­vid­ual risk and sys­temic risk asso­ci­at­ed with these dif­fer­ent sys­tems which com­prise our mod­ern world”.

We live in the age of “sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism”, where social media giants draw in bil­lions of peo­ple with free ser­vices but mon­i­tor their behav­iour, often with­out their explic­it con­sent. As Pro­fes­sor Shoshana Zuboff writes in her book, The Age of Sur­veil­lance Cap­i­tal­ism, this “claims human expe­ri­ence as raw free mate­r­i­al for trans­la­tion into behav­iour­al data”. 

Against this back­drop, Mr Crab­tree and Dr Sell­ers are deter­mined to democ­ra­tise the murky busi­ness of data aggre­ga­tion and ana­lyt­ics, help­ing organ­i­sa­tions trans­form them­selves and bring about pos­i­tive change. It was his deep com­mit­ment to this mis­sion that moti­vat­ed Mr Crab­tree to co-found QOMPLX, a uni­fied enter­prise ana­lyt­ics-as-a-ser­vice plat­form that uses data sci­ence and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to solve com­plex, real-world prob­lems at scale. The found­ing was a kind of response to “an aller­gic reac­tion to being con­front­ed with the lack of tools to rea­son about our real­ly com­plex and inter­con­nect­ed world”, Mr Crab­tree says. 

QOMPLX is best known for its work in cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, help­ing clients like glob­al tech­nol­o­gy firms, invest­ment banks and law prac­tices to pre­vent ran­somware and secu­ri­ty breach­es and to analyse their defence data. The com­pa­ny, with teams across the US and the UK, also oper­ates cyber insur­ance man­ag­ing gen­er­al agents, who lever­age QOMPLX tech­nol­o­gy and exper­tise to pro­vide insur­ance against chal­leng­ing per­ils, such as cyber­se­cu­ri­ty attacks and ter­ror­ism.

QOMPLX has secured $78.6 mil­lion in equi­ty invest­ment since its found­ing in 2015, led by well-known finan­cial ser­vices-focused insti­tu­tion­al investors Can­nae Hold­ings and Motive Part­ners. The com­pa­ny has amassed a team of 200 peo­ple, with offices in Vir­ginia, Lon­don, Den­ver, New York and Mon­te­v­ideo. 

Mr Crabtree’s vision is clear. “QOMPLX is real­ly about how we actu­al­ly help organ­i­sa­tions thrive via supe­ri­or risk man­age­ment and trans­fer in the face of tremen­dous com­plex­i­ty.”

Root problems

Serv­ing in the bat­tle­field in Afghanistan and rep­re­sent­ing Army Cyber Com­mand in its work with intel­li­gence agen­cies and oth­er ser­vices helped shape his approach to prob­lem solv­ing in the world of big data, Mr Crab­tree adds.

“When we start­ed think­ing about the root prob­lems that we had, every organ­i­sa­tion was real­ly fac­ing the same basic chal­lenge,” he explains. “We’ve all got a bunch of messy data of dubi­ous qual­i­ty and ori­gin, and we want­ed to try and fig­ure out how to make the best oper­a­tional deci­sions with it. A big part of our approach was that sim­u­la­tions, not just over­hyped machine learn­ing and deep learn­ing, need­ed to be a part of any last­ing solu­tion.”

Mr Crab­tree was inter­viewed for a Dun & Brad­street-pro­duced pod­cast, The Pow­er of Data, in late 2019. “We’re an infra­struc­ture provider – we’re an enabler,” he told lis­ten­ers. 

For Mr Crab­tree, ana­lyt­ics and data should be both ennobling and enabling.

“We didn’t start this com­pa­ny to go try and sell it,” he says. “We start­ed it because we believe there is a tremen­dous tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vice qual­i­ty gap in the mar­ket.”

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