Hussein Nasser Eddine and his partner Laila Akel founded Red Crow Intelligence a security and intelligence company in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank. He started the business in 2014 in order to help organisations and individuals have better access to information and therefore help them mitigate risks in hostile environments such as the Occupied Palestinian territories. They piloted their knowledge and skills using open source security data in Israel and Palestine and after recognising a gap in the market for real time data, have broadened the business to encompass the Middle east and North Africa (MENA) regions. After working with SPARK’s local partner Leaders Organisation under their Seed fund which provided them with credit to build their start-up they were able to build up the business to service 10 clients and employ 6 personal with a three-year business strategy.
Hussein and Laila developed a fully automated platform with a mobile app which collects and provides intelligence information from government sources and private organisations to clients in real time. Clients have found that it helps them access information about security threats and gives them more independence by improving their ability to organise their tactics and strategically plan ahead. Hussein is proud to offer his clients value for money as well – offering the service at a much lower rate than has previously been available which sets them ahead of their competitors. Hussein admits that their biggest challenge has been in recruitment due to the lack of affordable local expertise and skills in data systems but they have been overcoming this slowly and have compensated by building an independent data system. Red Crow was selected to travel to Silicon Valley recently which resulted in an award of $100,000 credit for the Google Cloud Platform, access to architecture reviews and technical mentors and 24/7 support from Google which will accelerate their infrastructure and give them access to a wide network of mentors.
What is your personal ambition?
Taking the company to a regional level during the first 3 years, then securing a share in the international market, while becoming a world-class risk mitigation solution and growing the business to cater for the MENA market
What impact do you see your business making?
“RedCrow intelligence aims to make tactical security information available to all who operate in hostile environments, such as International NGOs and humanitarian workers. We believe that knowledge and vigilance can save lives, and that intelligence should not be exclusive to governments and diplomats only. As every startup and young company, we hope to be able to contribute to the economy of Palestine through opening new job opportunities, and offering a creative environment for new talents.”
How do you see the future of your business?
“As every industry, the security intelligence industry is moving towards automation, to expedite the work process and be more accurate, also to eliminate error and deliver the information in a timely manner. The Open Source Intelligence (which is the backbone of RCI’s operations) is time consuming, monitoring the Open source, aggregating and analyzing the information, take up hours of continuous work, we at RCI have developed a system that does the work for us in a matter of seconds. We aim to keep refining our systems and creating new ones that would keep evolving as the times change. We aim to stay ahead in the technological aspect of the business.”
