Introduction
Usul is a company focused on democratizing access to defense-related data, particularly helping newer defense startups navigate the traditionally closed and competitive Department of Defense (DoD) ecosystem. The main challenge they address is the difficulty for newer players to compete with established defense giants like Lockheed Martin due to their entrenched networks and access to insider knowledge.
To level the playing field, Usul builds tools that structure and centralize market data, helping smaller companies make informed decisions and gain insights. We met with Joon, the co-founder of Usul, to discuss how NewsCatcher is helping them in their mission.
How NewsCatcher Supports Usul
Usul integrates NewsCatcher’s news data into their platform to power a feature called “Campaigns.” This feature provides users—primarily startups and consultants—with tailored, topic-specific news updates. For example, if a company is working on drones, the platform feeds them relevant articles and updates in that domain. This allows users to stay informed about industry developments in near real-time.
The news data is also used for secondary data enrichment, leveraging entity recognition from NewsCatcher’s API. This contributes to market insights by helping startups with market sizing and supporting consultants in managing multiple client insights within a single, centralized view.
Adopting the Solution
The implementation of NewsCatcher was smooth and efficient and they found,
“The data quality from NewsCatcher is exactly as promised—very clean and reliable”.
News is fetched on demand when users create a campaign, ensuring that updates are timely and relevant without unnecessary overhead.
While Usul explored alternatives such as Exa, they found no other provider that offered the same specificity and utility for their needs.
Looking forward, Usul plans to expand into offering daily, live-streamed competitor news. This expansion is driven by strong customer demand, particularly because news often provides critical insights faster than official government disclosures. For example, in the defense sector, there can be a 90-day delay in publishing awarded contracts, whereas news can reveal such activity the same day.
Conclusion
By outsourcing the heavy lifting of news aggregation and entity recognition to NewsCatcher, Usul saves significant engineering time and bandwidth, enabling the team to focus on core product development and the integration has laid a solid foundation for future product enhancements, particularly in competitive intelligence.