Evrim

Evrim: The Upstream Signal Layer for Economic Security

Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Arlington, Virginia
Invested: Valor led Evrim’s first institutional round in June 2026 with Techstars and others participating
Categories: Economic intelligence, National security, Artificial intelligence, Knowledge graphs

Evrim is the upstream signal layer for enterprise financial institutions, the defense industrial base, and federal agencies — surfacing the technologies, economies, and alliances reshaping global markets months to years before they reach conventional, English-language data platforms.

Courage, First

Valor backs founders with the courage to reinvent global industries — and we look for that courage wherever conviction outweighs comfort. Evrim is exactly that bet. Its founders spent nearly a decade inside Thomson Reuters Special Services building the intelligence products the U.S. defense and intelligence community runs on.

Economic Security Is National Security

Evrim’s thesis is simple and urgent: economic security has become national security, and enterprise companies need a persistent, cross-domain source of truth about how power and capital move through hard-to-reach geographies. The intelligence that matters most — government procurement, academic research, institutional relationships, supply-chain dependencies — sits behind national firewalls, in non-standard formats, in languages and systems built to resist automated access.

The market forming around that need is large and accelerating. The open-source intelligence market was valued at roughly $12.7–$15.9 billion in 2025 and is growing at a ~27% annual rate. U.S. Department of Defense spending on AI has climbed sharply since 2022, and the U.S. intelligence budget reached $115.5 billion for FY2026. Sophisticated buyers are converging on a single conclusion: whoever controls the collection pipe controls the insight.

What Evrim Does

Evrim ingests data from the world’s hardest-to-reach sources — foreign procurement databases, academic institutions, and government portals — using a proprietary, agent-native collection stack that navigates restricted web environments without relying on third-party crawlers or proxies. That raw, unstructured data is transformed into a continuously updated knowledge graph, where organizations are enriched with procurement spend, people are mapped to their relationships and histories, and research is linked back to the institutions behind it.

Today the graph spans 88,000+ sources across 150+ countries, with more than 10 million entities and over 500 million relationships. Analysts reach it through a natural-language agent interface; data teams reach it through an API and native MCP integration — making Evrim one of the first economic-intelligence platforms built for the agentic AI era.

Founders Built for This Mission

Evrim co-founders Hannah Lensing, Chris Smith, and Nick Courtney.

CEO and co-founder Chris Smith is a systems engineer who spent nearly ten years building threat-intelligence and collection technology for defense and intelligence customers at Thomson Reuters Special Services, with early access to frontier models for agentic web navigation — the foundation of Evrim’s collection stack. Co-founder and CPO Hannah Lensing pairs intelligence analysis, data science, and technical program leadership, and has shaped product strategy directly with government customers. CTO Nick Courtney, the team’s former lead data scientist, rounds out a founding team that has shipped first-of-its-kind systems for the most demanding buyers in the world. The team first built together at Thomson Reuters — winning the 2021 INSA/AFCEA EPIC App Challenge — before reuniting to found Evrim.

Momentum

In June 2026, Valor Ventures led Evrim’s first institutional round, and Valor founder and managing partner Lisa Calhoun joined Evrim’s newly formed board of directors. The investment follows early traction with the fourth largest asset manager in the world, and more demanding buyers in defense and financial services — and a platform already operating well ahead of its stage on a remarkably capital-efficient base.

Why Valor

Evrim pairs a generational market — the intelligence infrastructure layer beneath economic security — with a team that did not study this domain from the outside but built its foundations from within. We are proud to lead Evrim’s first round and to help Chris, Hannah, and Nick build an enduring company from the ground up.