Samdesk is offering its real-time, AI-powered crisis monitoring and alerts at no cost to people and organizations who need to stay informed about what's happening in Ukraine.
"We're living through pretty extraordinary times, where a global event has tremendous impact, not only just for the people of Ukraine, obviously and significantly, but will have a spillover effect to pretty much the entire population of the world," said James Neufeld, samdesk's CEO and founder.
The Edmonton-based startup is prioritizing requests from first responders and others that have a direct need for the information as Russia continues the invasion it launched on Feb. 24. That includes non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International.
"It's critical for us to support NGOs and governments that are building cases around the atrocities that are happening. Social is that kind of eyewitness perspective, where we're seeing a lot of that come through there," Neufeld explained.
Samdesk has also been helping corporate clients, typically its largest customer segment, keep track of sanctions and other restrictions so that brands can "be aware of their responsibilities to respond to the situation."
Neufeld said samdesk's system has several checks and balances in place to fight misinformation and disinformation. For one thing, it's not paying much attention to political commentary or rhetoric, but rather reactions on social media to actual events.
"What we're really good at is understanding physical, real-world events in space and time. What that allows us to do is look at a lot of different data sources from different angles to corroborate what we think are factual events," he said.
Once the company's artificial intelligence detects an event such as an explosion, a missile attack, gunfights, or troop movements, its human employees help to contextualize what happened. "There's no human team large enough to process 100,000 different data sources and billions of data points every single day ... but we are also fans of the human in the loop," Neufeld said.
And the people-powered portion of the company continues to grow. Samdesk has doubled from 25 to 50 since it closed its $13.5 million Series A funding round last fall, and is poised to add another 25 people within the next year.
Samdesk is offering its monitoring and alerts for free to those who need it to track the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Supplied)
This isn't the first time samdesk has offered its services for free — it also put out a call to those who needed its information at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Samdesk ended that offer after about six months, as more government programs were established and regular reporting became the main source of information for individuals and businesses. Neufeld expects the value that samdesk offers for Ukraine will also decrease as governments and journalists develop more substantial reporting structures.
The company's business model makes it possible to offer its services for free during a large-scale crisis like the one in Ukraine because it is processing the data regardless, so adding new users is an incremental cost. The magnitude of the crisis guides Neufeld and his leadership team on whether to lift the paywall.
This also helps samdesk demonstrate what it can offer, which can bring in more business. But Neufeld recognizes that many of the organizations and people who use the service for free may never become customers because they don't need the current level of crisis alerting on an ongoing basis. And that's OK, he said, because the overall goal is to alleviate confusion and chaos and provide people with insight.
Founded in 2013, samdesk originally set out to help newsrooms monitor breaking news. It later pivoted to help all kinds of organizations understand what's going on. But it is still operating in a way that's similar to the initial mission.
"What we were calling breaking news in the early days of samdesk is what everybody else called a crisis," Neufeld said.
"Everybody's looking for and craving that critical information. We're driven by this underlying thesis of ... social media is gonna be a really disruptive factor for how information gets discovered."
If you need to stay informed about what's happening in Ukraine, you can email ukrainesupport@samdesk.io for access to samdesk's alerts.