Brief: Norwegian firm whose execs sold Jay-Z a failed music streaming platform agreed to merge with special ops phone-tracking firm
Unacast and Gravy Analytics -- the owner of Venntel -- announced their merger yesterday, with Unacast CEO Thomas Walle remaining as CEO of the new company.
According to a press release published yesterday by Gravy Analytics, the cellphone location-tracking analytics firm has agreed to merge with the Norwegian “location insights” company Unacast. Gravy Analytics is best known as the parent company of the data broker and U.S. military contractor Venntel, which, in addition to its history of selling its cellphone location data through direct contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) , Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), has also subcontracted under the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command. Venntel has also reportedly served as the cellphone location data source for the data fusion company Babel Street, as well as for Fog Reveal, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation referred to as “mass surveillance on a budget”.
But the Norwegian “location insights” company Unacast, which appears to be the senior partner in the as-of-yet-unnamed merged company, has a far different reputation. While the company sold roughly five months of “Unacast Human Mobility Data” to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) in December 2019 for $30,000, the ‘about’ page of Unacast’s website leads with their CEO, Thomas Walle, founding “the music streaming service TIDAL (later acquired by Jay Z).” According to yesterday’s press release, Walle will be the CEO of the merger between Unacast and Gravy Analytics, while Mr. White will become President. (Gravy Analytics did not response to a request for comment regarding the name of the merged company.)
But despite Unacast’s pride in selling Tidal to Jay-Z in 2015 for $56 million, the streaming service has largely been considered a failure. As recently as this May, a class action lawsuit was dismissed regarding financial technology company Block’s “terrible” purchase of Tidal from Jay-Z for $297 million in 2021. According to the Florida pension fund which filed the lawsuit, Block co-founder Jack Dorsey agreed to the purchase as a result of being friends with Jay-Z. And a New York University business professor quoted in the complaint referred to Dorsey’s purchase of Tidal as “a $300 million bar tab to hang out with Jay-Z.”
The founders of Tidal are now in charge of perhaps the central cellphone location-tracking data broker for U.S. defense and intelligence. As reported by the author last month, the commercial cellphone data industry has struggled since the combination of family safety application Life360 ending its data brokerage practices, as well as Apple introducing its App Tracking Transparency requirements for iPhone applications. Such market dynamics appear to have led to a Norwegian company having significant influence over a data supply chain for U.S. intelligence.