CrowdThreat

Napoleon Bonaparte once observed that “war is 90 per cent information.” It is a lesson rooted in the power — and fragility — of intelligence. For Michael McCabe, a former military intelligence operator, the consequences of incomplete or delayed information are not theoretical. After serving in the British Army and working in the private security sector during deployments in Iraq, he later built Durham-based Intelligence Fusion into a global threat intelligence platform before its acquisition by Sigma7 in 2022. Crowd Threat builds on that experience. The core problem is scale. The world is vast, complex and fast-moving. Traditional intelligence models rely on small, centralised analyst teams attempting to interpret events from afar — often without cultural context or local language fluency. Major events dominate headlines, but thousands of emerging and localised threats never surface. Crowd Threat addresses this by decentralising intelligence gathering. The platform provides a real-time global map of incidents, powered by a distributed network of contributors reporting events as they unfold. Contributors are trained and supported by AI-assisted tools to structure reports and categorise incidents. Submissions are verified by human analysts, ensuring quality control while maintaining scalability. The system rewards speed and accuracy, creating incentives aligned with reliable reporting. Importantly, Crowd Threat was designed to scale organically. As trust grows, verification layers evolve, and the system compounds in value. More contributors lead to broader coverage, faster reporting and richer data. At sufficient scale, this enables pattern recognition, trend analysis and predictive capability — transforming situational awareness into forward-looking intelligence. To bring the platform to life, Michael partnered with Wubbleyou. The collaboration was not framed as a simple build. Instead, Wubbleyou worked as a strategic partner, helping shape product strategy, user experience and technical architecture while providing disciplined prioritisation. The focus was on testing the highest-value elements first — building the core that delivered disproportionate impact before expanding further. As a non-technical founder, Michael credits this grounding influence as critical to ensuring the product was usable, provable and scalable before expansion. The partnership also reflects a shared belief in the North East’s capacity to build globally ambitious technology businesses. Both see Crowd Threat as evidence that globally scalable platforms can be designed and delivered from the region. Launched in November, Crowd Threat has already attracted a growing contributor base and hundreds of verified threat reports — early proof that decentralised intelligence gathering can sustain both volume and quality. The longer-term ambition is clear: not simply to map incidents, but to build a living data engine capable of transforming how organisations understand and respond to global risk. Content Credit: https://netimesmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mapping-the-future-of-intelligence/