TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alum Expect Labs has closed a strategic investment and software development agreement with In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. Intelligence community.
Last week, Expect Labs launched its MindMeld API for building smart voice controls and content discovery into apps or websites, which you can demo here. They let you intuitively dig through a large data set using voice controls — for instance, you could search IMDB for “The Life Aquatic” by asking, “What is that Wes Anderson movie where Bill Murray is an oceanographer?”
While the company wasn’t able to give specifics due to the nature of In-Q-Tel’s efforts, Expect Labs CEO Tim Tuttle told TechCrunch that they will be helping In-Q-Tel and the government agencies it works with to create better tools for digging through large sets of information using the same MindMeld technology it offers to anyone else.
In its other deals of a similar nature, Expect Labs uses its familiarity with MindMeld to get a partner up and running using the technology. That might mean taking a large dataset that’s already in use and adapting it to be used as a knowledge graph for the MindMeld APIs or looking at a partner’s existing apps or needs and seeing how their APIs could be deployed most effectively.
Expect Labs wasn’t able to give an exact figure for the investment from In-Q-Tel. Previous investments have come in from Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Greylock Partners, and others.