The story
The initiative that became In-Q-Tel was developed within the CIA in 1998. The entity was incorporated as Peleus, Inc. on February 17, 1999, and received an initial CIA contract the following month. Its name was changed to In-Q-It in July 1999. After being publicly announced under that name in September 1999, the corporate name was subsequently changed to In-Q-Tel in January 2000.
In-Q-Tel was "the brainchild" of former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Gilman Louie was In-Q-Tel's first CEO and Norm Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, led the board of directors. In-Q-Tel's mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. Congress approved funding for In-Q-Tel, which was increased in later years. Origins of the corporation can also be traced to Ruth A. David, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1990s and promoted the importance of rapidly advancing information technology for the CIA.
The organization was created in part to provide the intelligence community with access to commercially developed technologies rather than relying solely on classified internal research and development. By 2001, In-Q-Tel maintained offices in Rosslyn, Virginia, and Palo Alto, California, from which it searched for commercially developed technologies.
Following the September 11 attacks, government agencies increasingly sought technological advice and expertise from In-Q-Tel, while the number of business plans submitted to the organization rose to two or three times its pre-attack level.
In-Q-Tel engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that provide superior capabilities for the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community. Other U.S. government agencies also work with The Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate has described its collaboration with In-Q-Tel as a means of identifying emerging technologies for DHS partners.
In-Q-Tel concentrates on three broad commercial technology areas: software, infrastructure and materials sciences.
Former CIA director George Tenet said,
We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered... In-Q-Tel.... While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology... This... collaboration... enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM-DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.
Read the full text
In-Q-Tel invested in mapping company Keyhole, Inc in 2003. Google acquired Keyhole the following year, and its technology became the basis for Google Earth. In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over US$2.2 million, on November 15, 2005. The shares had been acquired as a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc.
By 2005, after five years of active operations, In-Q-Tel had reportedly invested in more than 75 companies and delivered more than 100 technologies to the CIA.
Gilman Louie was succeeded as president and CEO by Amit Yoran in January 2006. By that time, In-Q-Tel had 64 employees and formal agreements with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Yoran resigned in April 2006 after four months in the position, and Christopher Darby assumed the role of president and CEO in September 2006.
In August 2006, In-Q-Tel reviewed more than 5,800 business plans and invested approximately $150M in more than 90 companies.
In 2009 and 2010, In-Q-Tel invested in technologies for analyzing publicly available online information, including social media monitoring company Visible Technologies and web analysis company Recorded Future.
As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were secret, according to the Washington Post.
In 2018 and 2019, In-Q-Tel expanded its activities internationally with the establishment of offices in London and Sydney. In December 2023, the organization announced the opening of a Singapore office to support engagement in the Asia-Pacific region. According to the company’s own milestones record, a further office was added in Munich in 2023.
From Wikipedia’s article on In-Q-Tel, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4