How Steve Wozniak and Indonesia's CIA collided
A presentation from Orbital Insight confirms that the company's secretive "Project Alpha" had a kickoff meeting with Indonesia's State Intelligence Agency and Grandrich Corporation in June.
2024-05-06: Reuters confirmed this publication's reporting on Orbital's planned acquisition by Privateer, albeit more than six months later, with no credit and no discussion of Orbital’s primary funding source becoming Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency.
2023-10-24: Added further comment from Planet Labs.
What began as an investigation into lawsuits against Palo Alto-based data fusion company Orbital Insight for its alleged failure to pay rent resulted in far darker revelations. Over the last month, the author has exposed both the company’s ongoing attempt to merge with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s satellite company Privateer, as well as Orbital’s desperate pivot into supporting a largescale wiretapping program run by the Indonesian government.
Orbital’s “Project Alpha” work with the Indonesian government was revealed in a previous article to have become Orbital’s primary revenue source, and a former participant on the program alleged that the effort was focused on helping Indonesian intelligence track “very precise location on anybody in the country,” especially in West Papua, where Indonesian security services have reportedly recently engaged in the torture of children. But this article newly confirms — based upon a leaked Orbital slide deck — that the main customer is indeed Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency, better known as the BIN, and further solidifies the conclusion that the Singapore-based Grandrich Corporation is the primary systems integrator.
We are also revealing that, according to a confidential source, merger talks between Orbital and Wozniak’s Privateer have been active as recently as this week, with the plan being to value Orbital as roughly $20 million of the potentially $90 million merged company. Given that Orbital has raised more than $125 million in venture capital, which was once valued at $200 million, Orbital is allegedly now valued at just a tenth of this previous peak.
The merger is allegedly contingent upon Orbital completing its $3 million dollar emergency fundraising round, which Google Ventures has chipped into, as well as Privateer separately raising $30 million to provide runway to the merged company.
Orbital’s leaked June presentation also details the company’s numerous failed merger and acquisition attempts, including to sell its assets to the multi-billion dollar data labeling company Scale AI and the Google-backed satellite imagery company Planet Labs. When previously reached for comment on its alleged involvement in Project Alpha, Planet stated that it did not have an active contract with Orbital and that its expired contract “explicitly barred the use of our data to support defense and intelligence”. A Planet spokesperson denied that the company was considering acquiring Orbital’s technology but did not answer whether the company had been aware of Project Alpha.
Neither Orbital Insight, Privateer, or Steve Wozniak responded to requests for comment, despite the former’s previous attempts to legally suppress this series of investigations.
Appendix
A full copy of a September 14th investment pitch deck from Orbital Insight is being published here. In addition to the second slide disclosing that Project Alpha’s “GR/BIN Kickoff” took place “in Singapore / Jakarta” that week, the third slide lists Orbital’s numerous failed attempts at mergers and acquisitions earlier this year.
Is Orbital’s technology unique? Or is the value of the company based on its contracts? If the company does not have unique technology and is run by the maroons you showed us in a previous article, then it’s no wonder they are going to the dark side to make some money.