The Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, was documented in real time from nearly every angle — by cameras the killers wore themselves, by security devices, CCTV, dashcams, phones, and drones overhead. As teams worked to pull relevant intelligence, including hopes of finding the hundreds missing or abducted, Israel’s security services confronted a labyrinth: the answers were almost certainly in there, if anyone could find them.

Drowning in footage, officials turned to local startups in the private sector developing artificial intelligence systems to help analyze and quickly extract relevant intelligence from the mountain of information.

One of those startups was Airis Labs, a startup specializing in AI-powered visual threat analysis.

“In the evening of October 7, several organizations approached us asking for help to analyze videos coming from a wide range of visual sensors from Gaza,” Airis Labs co-founder Noam Friedman told The Times of Israel. “We had just established the startup in early 2023 around lessons that we saw emerging from the war in Ukraine, which exposed that the world of intelligence was rapidly transitioning from text to video, while existing intelligence platforms weren’t keeping pace.”

“We saw analysts drowning in data to extract the needle from the haystack while critical signals and intelligence were being missed,” said Friedman.

Since April 2023, the startup’s founders — Friedman; Rotem Abeles, a former Palantir........

© The Times of Israel