A Pittsburgh AI firm that works with law enforcement around the world to combat human trafficking and other organized crimes committed online, is cementing its foothold abroad with a new London office to oversee its European expansion efforts.
Marinus Analytics, which had its tech stack initially built in 2011 based on research that came out of Carnegie Mellon University, has appointed Ian Kearns to serve as the firm's director for the U.K. & Europe. Kearns previously worked with Marinus as a client to help facilitate the company's relationship with British law enforcement.
Kearns said that Marinus "has been working with nearly all of the law enforcement organizations in the U.K. from Pittsburgh," and that it has increased such partnerships over the past 12 months.
"We're now working with almost the whole of U.K. law enforcement and almost all of that was developed out of Pittsburgh," Kearns said. "The concrete answer to the question 'why an office in London' is that we need a base here, we need a team here to help service the client base that the company has managed to grow already here. And obviously having staff here means we can deepen those relationships."
According to Cara Jones, CEO and co-founder of Marinus, these relationships have been years in the making.
"To work with the police, it's a long journey; to build trust and to be vetted as a vendor," Jones said. "We've been putting in a lot of time to cultivate these relationships, and so things like the U.K.; those seeds were planted five, six years ago now."
Jones said Marinus, founded in 2015, now employs a dozen people globally, most of whom work in Pittsburgh, though the company also maintains some of its operations in Colorado and now also in the U.K.
She said the company has an annual revenue of about $2 million, of which 80% comes from its flagship and annual subscription-based "Traffic Jam" product.
With this tool, Marinus touts the ability to help law enforcement officials identify victims of human trafficking via the data it pulls from the hundreds of thousands of online advertisements posted daily that are selling sexual services. Behind many of these advertisements are victims of human trafficking, Marinus said, and the company's suite of AI-powered analytics tools have been used to identify an estimated 3,800 victims of sex trafficking globally.
"What we did here in Pittsburgh — to put together technology for social good — is having a global impact," Jones said. "I think that it goes a lot to say that Pittsburgh has cultivated social entrepreneurs and Pittsburgh has a history of cultivating social entrepreneurs. … And it's having a benefit for where we're at right now with the global internet issues and contending with that."
