Base Operations
AI-powered physical threat intelligence and risk management platform for global security.
Website: https://www.baseoperations.com/
Cover Block
From the public record
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Base Operations |
| Tagline | AI-powered physical threat intelligence and risk management platform for global security. |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C., USA [Crunchbase] |
| Founded | 2018 [Crunchbase] |
| Stage | Series A [PR Newswire, December 2023] |
| Business Model | SaaS [PR Newswire, December 2023] |
| Industry | Security |
| Technology | AI / Machine Learning [Base Operations] |
| Geography | Global / Remote-First [Base Operations] |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale [PR Newswire, December 2023] |
| Founding Team | Solo Founder [Crunchbase] |
| Founder | Cory Siskind [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] |
| Funding Label | Series A |
| Total Disclosed Funding | ~$9.1 million [PR Newswire, December 2023] |
Links
From the public record
- Website: https://www.baseoperations.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/base-operations
The Short Version
PUBLIC Base Operations sells software for physical threat intelligence, and it merits attention now because it paired a disclosed $9.1 million Series A in December 2023 with a May 2025 AFWERX Direct-to-Phase II selection tied to U.S. Air Force mission resilience and force protection [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025]. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Washington, D.C., with founder Cory Siskind describing the original insight as a response to the manual, fragmented way global security teams assembled threat reporting for people and assets in the field [Crunchbase] [Nathan Lustig].
The product pitch is unusually specific for a security SaaS company: Base Operations says it aggregates public and proprietary threat data at street level, converts that into location-based risk scoring, and offers both platform access and on-demand analyst reports for teams that need faster site, route, and footprint assessments [Base Operations] [PR Newswire, December 2023]. On the company's own materials, the differentiator is granularity rather than a broad security operations claim, with products such as BaseScore, BaseFusion, and an API framed around sub-mile risk comparison and integration into existing workflows [Base Operations].
Siskind is the central figure in the story and, on public record, brings a relevant blend of security, policy, and analytical training, including prior work at Control Risks and Booz & Company and degrees associated with Tufts, Harvard Kennedy School, and MIT Sloan, although parts of that background rely on limited-profile sources rather than broad independent reporting [Crunchbase] [Forbes] [TechCrunch, Retrieved 2026]. The public evidence does not yet surface a broader bench of named executives or repeat-founder history, so the team case remains closely tied to the founder's domain credibility and hiring progress, including open roles for a Head of Engineering and a Data Engineer [LinkedIn] [Base Operations].
On financing, the cleanest public fact is the $9.1 million Series A led by Grotech Ventures and Spero Ventures, with participation from Vela Partners, Good Growth Capital, Mindset Ventures, Alliance Holdings, and Gaingels [PR Newswire, December 2023]. The business model is SaaS, but what matters over the next 12 to 18 months is whether defense validation converts into durable commercial adoption, whether the company can prove that its data coverage and scoring translate into workflow stickiness, and whether it can broaden evidence of traction beyond company-published product claims and contract announcements [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] [Base Operations].
Unconfirmed -- This section relies materially on company materials and company-distributed announcements, with partial corroboration from Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Forbes, and TechCrunch.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Series A |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry / Vertical | Security |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | Global / Remote-First |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Solo Founder |
| Funding | $9.1M disclosed Series A; approximately $9.1M total disclosed |
The Company in Brief
PUBLIC The company presents as a Washington, D.C.-based physical security software business, founded in 2018, with a product built around location-level threat intelligence rather than traditional guard-force or consulting delivery [Crunchbase] [Base Operations]. Crunchbase lists Base Operations as a Series A company headquartered in Washington, D.C., and identifies Cory Siskind as founder and CEO [Crunchbase]. On its website, the company describes its platform in plain terms as "street-level threat intelligence for corporate security," a positioning that is consistent with a SaaS workflow for security teams managing distributed people, sites, and operations [Base Operations].
The founding narrative is only lightly documented in the source set, so the cleaner public chronology comes from corporate and funding records rather than retrospective storytelling [Crunchbase] [Base Operations]. The clearest milestone in the public record is the December 2023 Series A financing, when Base Operations announced a $9.1 million round led by Grotech Ventures, with participation from Spero Ventures, Vela Partners, Good Growth Capital, Mindset Ventures, Alliance Holdings, and Gaingels [PR Newswire, December 2023]. By May 2025, the company had added a government-facing milestone, announcing selection by AFWERX for a Direct-to-Phase II contract tied to U.S. Department of the Air Force mission resilience and force protection work [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
Those markers suggest a company that spent its first phase building category definition and data infrastructure, then moved into institutional validation through venture backing and defense procurement, although that sequencing is an analytical inference rather than a disclosed company timeline [Crunchbase] [Base Operations] [PR Newswire, December 2023]. What is publicly verifiable, and sufficient for orientation, is narrower: founded in 2018, headquartered in Washington, D.C., led by Cory Siskind, financed at least through a disclosed Series A, and now visibly selling into both enterprise security and government use cases [Crunchbase] [Base Operations] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
Single-source, plausible -- Core company identity is corroborated by Crunchbase and the company website, but milestone chronology in this section relies partly on company-distributed announcements rather than independent reporting.
What They Have Built
Platform and workflow
MIXED The product is pitched less as a monitoring feed and more as a decision layer for corporate security teams. Base Operations says its software turns global threat data into location-specific assessments, with a free "Base Report" that can generate an address-level threat assessment in roughly 90 seconds, and a paid platform that supports risk standardization across sites, executive protection, defense, and law-enforcement use cases [Base Operations] [PR Newswire, December 2023]. The company website describes the core workflow in plain terms: enter a location, receive a BaseScore, review crime trends and threat breakdowns, and use that output to prioritize higher-risk locations across a broader footprint [Base Operations].
The public product surface appears to center on a few named modules. BaseScore is described as a way to compare risk across a global footprint down to 0.1 mile granularity, BaseFusion is positioned as a unified view that combines internal and external data, and the API is marketed as a way to push location risk data into existing security systems [Base Operations]. Base Operations also offers analyst reports as a standalone service, which matters because it suggests the company is not relying solely on a full-platform sale to get in front of buyers [Base Operations].
Data model and technical posture
MIXED The technical claim that stands out is granularity. On its website and related company materials, Base Operations says it provides street-level threat intelligence globally, aggregates more than 25,000 data sources, maps more than 250 million incidents, and covers more than 5,000 cities with 99% U.S. coverage [Base Operations]. Those figures come from company-controlled materials, so they are best read as product positioning rather than independently verified benchmarks, but they are directionally consistent with the product's stated purpose of making physical risk comparable across dispersed locations [Base Operations].
The hiring footprint gives a limited but useful read on how the stack may be evolving. Open roles for Head of Engineering and Data Engineer indicate continued investment in data infrastructure, and a third-party job description tied to the Data Engineer role references ETL pipelines, structured and unstructured data, machine-learning enrichment, data transformations, quality monitoring, warehouses, dimensional models, governance, and data architecture, all of which point to a fairly data-intensive back end (inferred from job postings) [LinkedIn] [Startup Intros]. A May 2025 company announcement about an AFWERX Direct-to-Phase II contract adds one more public signal: Base Operations is trying to apply the same intelligence layer to defense use cases that require threat identification and assessment in dynamic operating environments [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
Unconfirmed -- This section relies heavily on company website and company-distributed announcements, with limited independent corroboration from PR Newswire, Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, LinkedIn, and Startup Intros.
Market Size and Demand
PUBLIC
Physical security software has started to look less discretionary because large employers, travel programs, and government operators now face a wider spread of location-specific risk, while the underlying data needed to monitor that risk has become cheaper to ingest and standardize [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
The available public record does not provide a named third-party TAM for Base Operations' exact category, which sits between corporate security software, threat intelligence, travel risk management, and defense force-protection tooling. The cleaner way to frame the market is as an analogous set of adjacent budgets rather than a single precise bucket. Base Operations itself positions the platform across corporate security, defense and intelligence, and law enforcement workflows, with products that range from one-off threat assessments to broader platform deployments [Base Operations]. That matters because the company's route to market is not limited to one buyer persona. It can plausibly sell into enterprise security teams managing offices and executives, and into public-sector buyers evaluating force protection and operational resilience [Base Operations] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
| Market lens | What the source supports | Relevance to Base Operations |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate security software (analogous market, source) | Base Operations markets to corporate security teams managing site risk, executive protection, and global footprints [Base Operations] | Likely core commercial budget owner for the platform and analyst-report products |
| Travel and workforce risk management (analogous market, source) | The company cites travel security and location threat assessment as use cases [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Base Operations] | Expands use beyond fixed sites into employee movement and trip planning |
| Government and defense force protection (analogous market, source) | AFWERX selected Base Operations for a Direct-to-Phase II contract tied to mission resilience and force protection [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] | Establishes a public-sector wedge with different procurement dynamics and longer sales cycles |
| Law enforcement and multi-jurisdiction operations (analogous market, source) | The website markets a common operating picture across jurisdictions [Base Operations] | Suggests adjacency in public safety, though public customer depth is not independently verified |
The table points to a market that is broad in budget source but still narrow in workflow. The practical implication is that Base Operations does not need to own a whole "security software" category to matter; it needs to become system-of-record or system-of-decision for location-based risk in a few high-value use cases.
Demand drivers are easier to verify than market size. The company and its backers consistently describe a fragmented operating environment in which security teams still assemble location risk views from many local inputs, then convert them into executive-facing decisions [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Base Operations]. Base Operations' pitch, aggregating many sources into a comparable street-level view, lines up with a real purchasing friction: multinational organizations need decisions that can be compared across cities and countries, not just within a single police jurisdiction [Base Operations]. On the public-sector side, the May 2025 AFWERX announcement is the clearest evidence that mission resilience and force protection are active spending themes rather than abstract narratives [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
Several tailwinds follow from that setup. First, employers have more dispersed operating footprints than they did a decade ago, which raises the cost of manual site-by-site assessment [Base Operations] [Nathan Lustig]. Second, security leaders are being asked to justify decisions in formats that non-specialists, including finance and operations executives, can review quickly, which supports products that convert raw incident data into standardized scores and reports [Base Operations]. Third, defense and government buyers continue to show interest in AI-assisted decision support for dynamic environments, though the public evidence here is still limited to one named contract announcement rather than a broad pipeline [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
The adjacent and substitute markets are material because they define where Base Operations could win or get squeezed. One substitute is traditional security consulting, where analysts produce bespoke threat assessments for facilities, travel, or executive protection. Another is point solutions in travel risk management or crisis monitoring that may handle alerting well but are less centered on persistent place-based scoring. A third substitute is internal analyst teams stitching together police data, government feeds, and news coverage in-house, which is feasible for the largest organizations but costly to maintain globally [Base Operations] [Nathan Lustig]. If Base Operations succeeds, it is likely by compressing the work of those substitutes into faster and more standardized workflows, not by creating wholly new security spend.
Regulatory and macro forces appear supportive, although the public evidence is mostly indirect. Government procurement remains a meaningful signal, because selection by AFWERX suggests demand for tools that can operate in constrained or fast-changing environments, even if one award does not establish repeatability [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025]. More broadly, employers face a duty-of-care expectation around employee travel, facilities, and executive movement, which tends to preserve spending on risk visibility during volatile periods. At the same time, procurement in both enterprise and government settings can lengthen when software touches security operations, data provenance, or decision accountability. That creates a market with real need, but one that may reward credibility and integrations more than pure feature breadth.
Unconfirmed -- This section relies primarily on company materials and company-distributed announcements, with one named public-sector award announcement providing partial external validation [Base Operations] [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
Who Else Is Fighting for This
MIXED Base Operations appears to sit between legacy security advisory workflows and broader software-led risk platforms, with its clearest public positioning centered on street-level physical threat intelligence rather than a full-stack corporate security suite [Base Operations, Unknown] [PR Newswire, December 2023].
The public record is thinner on named rivals than on product claims, which limits any hard share-of-market read. Even so, the segment map is fairly legible. On one side are incumbent advisory and intelligence firms, the kind of providers that historically assembled location threat assessments through analyst labor and client-specific reporting, a workflow the founder has described as central to the original problem statement behind the company [Nathan Lustig] [TechCrunch, Retrieved 2026]. On another are software challengers that package physical security, travel risk, and site-level intelligence into recurring SaaS, which is the lane Base Operations itself claims through products such as BaseScore, BaseFusion, API access, and on-demand analyst reports [Base Operations, Unknown]. A third bucket is adjacent substitutes, including internal security teams using public crime feeds, government advisories, spreadsheets, and static consulting reports, which the company explicitly frames as slower and less standardized than its own approach [Base Operations, Unknown].
Where Base Operations seems to have an edge today is product packaging around location-level intelligence and workflow compression. The company says it can generate a free threat assessment for any address in 90 seconds, compare risk down to 0.1 mile granularity, and aggregate more than 25,000 global data sources into a standardized view [Base Operations, Unknown]. If those claims hold in practice, the advantage is less about a novel security category and more about turning fragmented local data into a decision layer that is faster to use than analyst-built briefs and more operationally specific than country- or city-level risk tools [Base Operations, Unknown]. The December 2023 Series A led by Grotech Ventures and Spero Ventures gives some evidence that investors see room for a software-first entrant here, and the May 2025 AFWERX Direct-to-Phase II selection suggests the product can at least enter federal evaluation channels tied to force protection use cases [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025]. That said, much of this edge still looks perishable rather than locked in, because the key claims on data breadth, scoring quality, and workflow superiority remain primarily company-sourced in the public record [Base Operations, Unknown].
The main exposure is that several parts of the value proposition are easier to describe than to defend. A larger incumbent with an established enterprise security book, or a broader risk platform that already owns travel, supply chain, or workforce safety budgets, could plausibly add similar location-intelligence surfaces without needing to educate the buyer from scratch. Base Operations also does not appear, from the supplied public sources, to own a proprietary distribution channel or a deeply documented customer roster that would make displacement visibly difficult [Base Operations, Unknown] [LinkedIn, Unknown]. The Expedia case study and the Air Force announcement show credible use cases, but they do not yet establish category ownership across commercial and public-sector segments [Base Operations, Unknown] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025]. That leaves the company most exposed where procurement favors integrated suites, long-standing advisory relationships, or security vendors that can bundle physical threat intelligence into a broader operating platform.
Over the next 18 months, the most plausible competitive scenario is a sorting between firms that can prove repeatable workflow adoption and firms whose differentiation remains mostly narrative. Base Operations is a credible winner if government validation broadens into repeatable public-sector and enterprise references, especially because force-protection and site-risk use cases fit its street-level positioning [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] [PR Newswire, December 2023]. The more likely loser if buyers consolidate around broader platforms is the standalone point-solution layer in this category, and Base Operations would be vulnerable to that outcome unless it can show that its underlying data coverage, scoring logic, or operational workflows are materially better than what adjacent platforms can replicate [Base Operations, Unknown].
Opportunity
PUBLIC
The prize here is not another security dashboard, but the chance to become a system of record for physical risk decisions across large enterprises and government operators, a category that still appears comparatively under-softwared relative to cyber and IT security, according to the company's own founding rationale and product positioning [Nathan Lustig, Retrieved 2026] [Base Operations, Unknown].
The headline opportunity is straightforward: if Base Operations can turn fragmented local threat data into a trusted operating layer for site selection, executive protection, travel security, and force protection, it could become default infrastructure for physical security teams that operate across many geographies [Base Operations, Unknown] [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025]. That outcome is reachable, rather than purely aspirational, for three public reasons. First, the company is selling into workflows where comparability matters, since security leaders need to rank locations and allocate resources across portfolios, routes, and jurisdictions [Base Operations, Unknown]. Second, the product appears built around structured outputs, including BaseScore, BaseFusion, an API, and on-demand analyst reports, which suggests multiple entry points into the same buyer organization rather than a single report product [Base Operations, Unknown]. Third, Base Operations has already crossed two credibility thresholds that matter in this category: institutional venture backing through a $9.1 million Series A led by Grotech Ventures and Spero Ventures in December 2023, and selection by AFWERX for a Direct-to-Phase II contract in May 2025 tied to Air Force mission resilience and force protection [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025].
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise control plane for global security | Base Operations starts with assessments and reporting, then expands into recurring portfolio monitoring, risk scoring, and workflow integration across multinational security teams | A large enterprise buyer adopts the platform across multiple use cases because the same location data can support corporate security, travel security, and supply chain decisions [Base Operations, Unknown] | The product is already presented as a platform with scoring, data fusion, API access, and analyst reports, which is a credible land-and-expand structure rather than a single-feature tool [Base Operations, Unknown] |
| Defense and federal program wedge | The AFWERX award becomes a reference point that opens additional defense and public-sector buying, especially where distributed operations need location-level threat intelligence | Conversion of the Direct-to-Phase II work into broader Department of the Air Force or adjacent federal usage [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] | The company has already been selected for a named Air Force program centered on threat assessment and force protection, which is a meaningful validation event in a trust-heavy market [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] |
| Embedded risk data layer | Base Operations becomes the intelligence backend inside other security software, internal customer tools, and operating systems via API distribution | API integrations make BaseScore and local threat data part of existing enterprise workflows, lowering friction to adoption [Base Operations, Unknown] | The company publicly markets API connectivity and data fusion, and those features often support wider distribution than seat-based software alone if data quality proves durable [Base Operations, Unknown] |
What compounding looks like is less a consumer-style network effect than a data and workflow flywheel. Each additional deployment can increase the number of places where Base Operations' scores, reports, and fused datasets inform routine decisions, and once those outputs are embedded into executive briefings, route planning, site prioritization, or force protection workflows, switching costs rise because the buyer is no longer purchasing raw data alone [Base Operations, Unknown].
There is also a plausible supply-side compounding mechanism. The company says it aggregates more than 25,000 global data sources, maps incidents at large scale, and provides sub-mile analysis, while product modules like BaseFusion imply that customer internal data can be layered onto external feeds [Base Operations, Unknown]. Those are company claims, so they should be treated conservatively, but if validated, they point to a moat built on normalization, comparability, and workflow fit rather than model novelty. The two open technical roles, Head of Engineering and Data Engineer, are at least directionally consistent with a business still investing in data infrastructure and product depth rather than a services-only model [LinkedIn, Unknown].
The size of the win is best framed as a scenario, not a forecast. No clean public comparable is provided in the source set, and there is no sourced third-party market size figure here, so the most disciplined public read is qualitative: if Base Operations became a trusted operating layer for physical risk across Fortune 500 security teams and defense programs, the company could plausibly support an infrastructure-style valuation well above its current disclosed funding base of $9.1 million, potentially in the high hundreds of millions of dollars or more in enterprise value (scenario, not a forecast), but that upside rests on converting credibility in reports and contracts into repeatable software deployment at scale [PR Newswire, December 2023] [Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] [Base Operations, Unknown]. In other words, the opportunity is substantial because physical security has historically lacked standardized, software-native intelligence tooling, and Base Operations is trying to supply exactly that layer [Nathan Lustig, Retrieved 2026] [Base Operations, Unknown].
Unconfirmed -- This section relies materially on company statements about product scope and data coverage, with partial corroboration from PR Newswire on funding and Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire on the AFWERX award.
Sources
From the public record
[Crunchbase] Base Operations - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/base-operations
[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
[Base Operations] Base Operations | Street-Level Threat Intelligence for Corporate Security | https://www.baseoperations.com/
[Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, May 2025] Base Operations selected by the US Air Force to provide AI-driven security intelligence for mission resilience and force protection | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/operations-selected-us-air-force-143000064.html
[Nathan Lustig] Cory Siskind, Base Operations: Using Technology to Secure Global Workforces, Ep 81 | https://www.nathanlustig.com/cory-siskind-base-operations-using-technology-to-secure-global-workforces-ep-81/
[Forbes] Cory Siskind | https://www.forbes.com/profile/cory-siskind/
[TechCrunch, Retrieved 2026] How one founder is bringing the global corporate security industry out of the dark ages | https://techcrunch.com/podcast/how-one-founder-is-bringing-the-global-corporate-security-industry-out-of-the-dark-ages/
[LinkedIn] Base Operations | LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/base-operations
[Startup Intros] Base Operations: Funding, Team & Investors | Startup Intros | https://startupintros.com/orgs/base-operations
Articles about Base Operations
- Base Operations Is Scoring Street-Level Risk for the US Air Force — The Washington, D.C. startup is turning 25,000 global data sources into a single risk score for corporate security and government buyers.