Denver-based Orion has raised $3.5 million in funding to expand its AI-powered risk intelligence platform, which helps enterprises detect, measure, and respond to real-world threats before they disrupt operations. The round is led by Dynamo Ventures, with participation from Bravo Victor Venture Capital (BVVC), Techstars, and Service Provider Capital, as well as a government grant from Puerto Rico.
Orion positions itself as an intelligence infrastructure for physical risk and command-and-control teams, providing security and operations leaders with a single source of truth when facing protests, natural disasters, geopolitical instability, or supply-chain disruptions. Instead of relying on manual monitoring and fragmented point solutions, the platform fuses signals from social media, local news, geospatial feeds, and weather data to provide early visibility into emerging crises.
The company is targeting a growing pain point for large organizations that increasingly operate across complex, global networks. Orion cites industry estimates indicating that organizations lose hundreds of billions of dollars annually to avoidable disruptions, with an average major incident causing billions in operational damage. Even as corporations spend heavily on disconnected tools and external analysts, many teams still miss key signals or receive them too late to act.
Orion’s platform uses a proprietary methodology to generate real-time risk scores within a half-mile radius of any fixed or moving asset, filtering large volumes of data down to the specific threats relevant to a given organization. The system is designed to predict and quantify risks ranging from political unrest to environmental disruption days in advance, giving customers time to move people, reroute shipments, or reinforce critical infrastructure.
A core part of the technology stack is Orion’s internal STAN (Spatiotemporal Adaptive Network) framework. STAN learns from how each customer responds to disruption and then builds evolving, bespoke models for every asset, client, and crisis. Rather than static threat scores, the system produces explainable confidence levels that adjust as new data arrives and as teams demonstrate their own response patterns over time.
The company is already working with multiple Fortune 500 logistics and cloud infrastructure operators that use the platform to protect assets valued at tens of millions of dollars. One global customer uses Orion to monitor people and venues worldwide and reports cost savings of roughly 20 times those of traditional intelligence services, according to the company.
Pricing is structured to make wide deployment more accessible. Where legacy systems can cost more than $100,000 per site, Orion’s compute-based architecture enables per-asset pricing at around $1,000 per year, supporting network-wide coverage rather than isolated high-value locations.
Orion was founded in New York and is now headquartered in Denver. The team combines backgrounds in quantitative analytics, defense operations, and humanitarian response, reflecting its origins in disaster relief and crisis work. Founder and CEO Rahul Thayil previously worked as a senior analyst at Benenson Strategy Group and on United Nations environment projects, experience that informs the company’s focus on handling complex, real-world volatility at scale.
With the funding, Orion plans to deepen its coverage of global supply chains and defense networks and to build what it describes as one of the largest corpora of risk and reaction data. The long-term ambition is to power world models that allow external systems and AI agents to automate more of the response to crises, turning today’s bespoke, manual risk workflows into data-driven, machine-assisted resilience infrastructure.
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Risk teams no longer need more data; they need better signals, and Orion wants to turn fragmented, noisy information into clear guidance for supply-chain and defense customers.
Thayil emphasizes that the company’s engineers, drawn from leading universities, are building a platform that can see protests, natural hazards, and operational disruptions coming early enough for organizations to adjust people, routes, and assets before damage occurs.
Rahul Thayil, CEO, Orion
Investor Dynamo Ventures views Orion as foundational infrastructure for modern supply chains, giving operators real-time visibility into how shocks propagate across networks and helping them keep complex, global operations resilient in an increasingly unstable world.
Jon Bradford, Managing Partner, Dynamo Ventures
