The job of a corporate security chief is to know the difference between a safe neighborhood and a dangerous one, not just between a safe country and a dangerous one. For years, that meant stitching together PDFs from local police, news clippings, and third-party intel reports. It was a manual, time-consuming process that left a lot of room for error and missed patterns. Base Operations, a Washington, D.C.-based startup, is betting that a SaaS platform can turn that patchwork of data into a standardized, actionable risk score for any address on the planet.
Founded in 2018 by Cory Siskind, the company sells AI-powered physical threat intelligence software. Its core proposition is aggregation: pulling in data from over 25,000 global sources, including local police departments, government feeds, news outlets, and NGOs, to map more than 250 million incidents [Official Information About Base Operations For AI & LLMs | Base Operations]. The output is a platform that helps security teams visualize threats, prioritize risks across a global portfolio of locations, and generate reports, all at a hyperlocal, sub-mile level of granularity.
From Manual Reports to a Standardized Score
The company's wedge is a product called BaseScore, which assigns a comparative risk rating across a global footprint down to a 0.1-mile resolution [Zeroth Source]. For a multinational with offices, warehouses, and retail stores in hundreds of cities, this promises to replace subjective, narrative-heavy reports with a consistent metric. A second product, BaseFusion, allows teams to merge their own internal incident data with this external intelligence for a unified view.
The platform is designed for the workflows of enterprise security operations. It offers an API for integration into existing systems and on-demand Analyst Reports that can be purchased without a full platform subscription, serving as a potential lead-gen tool [Zeroth Source]. The company claims a free threat assessment for any address delivers results in 90 seconds, a clear attempt to demonstrate immediate value and lower the barrier to an initial conversation.
A Founder Steeped in Security and Policy
Cory Siskind's background reads like a curriculum vitae for this specific problem. She holds an MBA from MIT Sloan, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University [Cory Siskind - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook]. Her professional experience includes roles as a senior consultant at Booz & Company and, critically, time as an analyst at the risk consultancy Control Risks [Cory Siskind - 37 Years Old from Piedmont, CA].
The idea for the company reportedly crystallized in Mexico City in 2013, where Siskind observed the limitations of manually assembled threat briefings for protecting global workforces [Benjamin Dohm - Washington, District of Columbia, United States | Professional Profile | LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026]. This founder-market fit,a blend of policy analysis, consulting rigor, and direct exposure to the legacy tools of the trade,has been a key signal for investors.
Traction and a Strategic Government Win
In December 2023, Base Operations closed a $9.1 million Series A round led by Grotech Ventures and Spero Ventures, with participation from Vela Partners, Good Growth Capital, and others [PR Newswire, December 2023]. The capital has fueled product development and go-to-market efforts. While the company does not publicly disclose commercial customer counts, its most significant traction marker to date is a government contract.
In May 2025, AFWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, selected Base Operations for a Direct-to-Phase II contract [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025]. The work involves using the platform to identify, assess, and predict emerging threats,including small drone incursions,to improve mission resilience and force protection. A government deal of this nature serves as a powerful validation of the platform's technical capabilities and security posture, and it often opens doors to further public-sector and defense-adjacent commercial work.
The company's current hiring focus underscores its technical ambitions. Open roles include a Head of Engineering and a Data Engineer tasked with building ETL pipelines and machine-learning enrichment systems [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
| Role | Focus Area | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Head of Engineering | Technology Leadership | Washington, D.C. or Remote |
| Data Engineer | ETL, ML Enrichment, Data Architecture | Remote |
The Realistic Competitive Set
Base Operations operates in a niche where competition is often opaque and fragmented. The company's true competitors are not necessarily other venture-backed SaaS platforms, but the entrenched, manual ways of working and the array of specialized consultancies and intelligence firms that have long served this market.
- Legacy Consultancies. Firms like Control Risks (where Siskind worked) and others provide bespoke, analyst-driven threat reports. Base Operations is betting that speed, consistency, and cost efficiency will displace a portion of this high-touch, high-cost service.
- In-House Manual Processes. For many large organizations, the alternative is a dedicated employee or team manually aggregating news and data. The platform's automation and scale directly target this inefficiency.
- Incumbent Risk Data Providers. Larger global risk data companies often provide country or regional-level intelligence. Base Operations' differentiation is its street-level granularity and its focus on being a workflow tool, not just a data feed.
The company's ideal customer profile is clear: the security or risk management leader at a global enterprise with a physically distributed footprint. This could be a multinational corporation with offices and supply chains across emerging markets, a global hotel chain, an energy company with remote assets, or a logistics firm. The budget owner likely sits within corporate security, global operations, or sometimes travel risk. For these buyers, the procurement question isn't just about the accuracy of the data, but about how it streamlines a labor-intensive process and provides auditable, consistent reporting up the chain of command.
Where the Bet Gets Hard
The path to scaling an enterprise SaaS company in this category comes with specific, well-understood challenges. The sales cycle can be long and complex, involving stringent security reviews and convincing buyers to change deeply ingrained processes. Furthermore, the company's value proposition hinges on the perceived comprehensiveness and reliability of its data aggregation. Any high-profile lapse in threat detection could damage trust disproportionately.
The company's answer to these risks appears to be a combination of product-led growth tactics (like the free threat assessment) and a top-down validation strategy exemplified by the Air Force contract. Landing a flagship government customer not only provides revenue but also serves as a referenceable case study for commercial enterprises with similar security concerns.
For now, Base Operations has secured its Series A funding, a strategic beachhead customer, and a founder with credible domain expertise. The next twelve months will be about proving it can convert that foundation into a repeatable commercial sales motion beyond the public sector. The key milestone to watch is the announcement of its first named enterprise logos and any expansion of its footprint within the Department of Defense ecosystem. If it can do that, it will have moved from an interesting data aggregator to a must-have operating system for modern corporate security.
Sources
- [PR Newswire, December 2023] Base Operations Secures a $9.1M Series A to rework Global Threat Intelligence | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/base-operations-secures-a-9-1m-series-a-to-rework-global-threat-intelligence-302021353.html
- [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] Base Operations selected by the US Air Force to provide AI-driven security intelligence | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/operations-selected-us-air-force-143000064.html
- [Official Information About Base Operations For AI & LLMs | Base Operations] Official Company Information | https://www.baseoperations.com/
- [Zeroth Source] Company Product Overview
- [Benjamin Dohm - Washington, District of Columbia, United States | Professional Profile | LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026] LinkedIn Post on Company Origin
- [Cory Siskind - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook] Founder Background
- [Cory Siskind - 37 Years Old from Piedmont, CA] Founder Biography
- [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief] Company Overview and Job Listings | https://baseoperations.co/english