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Inside the CIA-backed venture fund that helped launch Palantir and Google Earth


Long before DOGE, In-Q-Tel brought Silicon Valley thinking to the Pentagon.

It puts the companies it picks in touch with end users inside the government to refine their products, all in hope of yielding tech that’s both commercially successful and useful to people protecting U.S. national security. Borrowing an idea from private equity firms where friends of his had worked, Bowsher trained a cadre of associates whose job was essentially what he calls “dialing for deals”—scouring magazines, newspapers, blogs, and newsletters for promising companies, cold-calling them, and set up meetings to learn about their business. The challenge was twofold: cramming the hardware and battery inside what is essentially a large rubber ball, and designing software that could stitch together all that lens data and stream it to a phone with minimal lag.

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