Christopher Ahlberg can predict the future – or at least he hopes his company can. Recorded Future provides companies and governments with intelligence updates based on scouring the internet for information – tweets, news article and blogs – that it then quickly analyses.

“It could be anything from when the Chinese premier is next planning to travel to Macau, to what product a rival company is about to launch,” says Ahlberg. Unsurprisingly, there is a fair amount of interest in this service. “Our customers are some of the largest corporations in the world that are interested in world events, hedge funds who do political risk-trading and even government agencies,” he says. He declines to name specific clients, as most prefer not to broadcast the fact that they access this type of information-gathering. The company’s advisers include David Carey, a former executive director of the CIA - and the investment arms of Google and the CIA have both backed the company.

Recorded Future, which was launched three years ago, has a turnover of around $10m a year and employs 35 people. The company is one of a number of start-ups that has utilised the twin technology trends of cloud computing and big data to underpin its business model. Its launch is a sign of how quickly the sector has matured: it is difficult to imagine Recorded Future operating as effectively just five years ago.