How Wirescreen is Turning Investigative Journalism Into a National Security Intelligence Tool
About our Guests
David Barboza is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wirescreen. Before founding the company, David spent over two decades as a journalist at The New York Times, where he served as Shanghai bureau chief for 12 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on the hidden wealth of Chinese political elites. A history major by training, David’s career was defined by painstaking, multi-year investigations that required connecting vast networks of corporate records, government documents, and financial data across borders. He also co-founded The Wire China, an independent publication covering the U.S.-China relationship.
Bradley Martinez is the Head of Go-to-Market at Wirescreen. Bradley’s career has centered on using data and analytics to drive risk-based and opportunistic decisions, primarily in financial services. Before joining Wirescreen (shortly after the company’s Series A), Bradley held roles at FactSet and other data-driven firms. At Wirescreen, he has overseen the company’s pivot from a financial services focus to a government-first go-to-market strategy, building the partner networks and sales infrastructure needed to scale in the federal market.
About Wirescreen
Wirescreen is a Sequoia-backed intelligence platform that maps Chinese business networks and their global connections for the U.S. government, defense contractors, and the broader national security community. The platform aggregates millions of Chinese corporate records (including ownership structures, investment flows, patent filings, supply chain relationships), translates them into English, and connects them to reveal hidden relationships between commercial entities and state/military actors. Originally conceived as a business intelligence tool for financial services, Wirescreen found its strongest product-market fit serving government agencies dealing with the complexities of great power competition. Use cases span export controls, IP theft investigations, CFIUS reviews, fentanyl precursor tracking, university research security, critical minerals mapping, and defense supply chain vetting. The company also operates The Wire China, a journalism division that both generates revenue and serves as a data quality feedback loop for the platform.
Key Takeaways
1. Build something people want (and sometimes “people” means YOU)
David Barboza set out to build a better tool for investigative journalism. After years of spending exceptional amounts of time on single investigations, manually stitching together documents scattered across filing cabinets and digital folders, he developed conviction that technology could help. He first tried to build a platform that could connect historical archives to new data from inside The New York Times, spending two years prototyping the concept with his co-founder Lynn. While the Times loved the investigations it produced, the company lacked the infrastructure or appetite to build and sustain a technology platform. So when his editor suggested a leave of absence, David took the leap. Like countless before him, he couldn’t resist the pull of building something he deeply wanted to use.
2. Demand signals, rather than a business plan, determine the market
Wirescreen’s original go-to-market strategy targeted Wall Street: investment banks, KYC compliance, due diligence firms. That’s where Bradley’s expertise lay and where the buyers of Chinese corporate data seemed to congregate. But the market had other ideas. A defense contractor discovered Wirescreen through The Wire China news magazine, and asked the company to license its data. Government agencies started reaching out, asking David to come to Washington for meetings. Meanwhile, as Bradley monitored GTM experiments running in financial services, they paled in comparison to the traction the team was gaining in government. Financial services showed interest but required multi-year procurement crawls through institutional onboarding processes. The government’s urgency offered a faster path to revenue. Turns out the government can move fast, when the urgency is high enough.
3. Direct user access is the most valuable asset
Even though many government deals ultimately flow through contractors or complex procurement vehicles, the conversations that mattered most for Wirescreen happened directly with the analysts, policymakers, and mission owners who would actually use their product. These conversations did two things: they validated whether the product solved their problem, and they generated the demand signals that shaped the company’s roadmap. When Wirescreen heard the same need from three or four different agencies, they knew it was time to invest engineering resources. Bradley also emphasizes the importance of building a generous partner network. This network allowed them to access people in the ecosystem willing to answer basic questions about government procurement mechanics (periods of performance, color of money, DFAR compliance).
4. An evolving threat landscape meant an evolving addressable market
One of the themes that kept coming up in this conversation was the genuine surprise the team felt as the ground shifted beneath their feet. Both David and Bradley repeatedly describe discovering use cases they never anticipated. They started with a hypothesis about defense industrial base supply chain vetting and export controls. But as they engaged more deeply with agencies, they uncovered demand from every direction: fentanyl precursor tracking, university research security, CFIUS investment reviews, critical minerals dependency mapping, cyber threat analysis, and more. Every time they thought they understood the scope of government need, it turned out to be bigger than they imagined. The reality is that competition with China touches nearly every facet of government operations, from defense to economic security, law enforcement, trade policy, higher education, and civil society. The key has been staying focused on the slice of the problem that Wirescreen solves, even as more potential partners as for more things.
5. Unconventional founder backgrounds can be a decisive competitive advantage
We don’t talk to too many journalist-founders on show. But David’s 20+ years as an investigative journalist gave him almost every skill needed to build a defense intelligence company. He honed the ability to connect disparate data points into a coherent narrative. He was comfortable operating in ambiguous, information-poor environments. He was willing to spend years pursuing an uncertain outcome (most of his investigations failed). He had experience doing the exact activity that his users were now discovering (archiving and organizing massive volumes of primary source material). And perhaps most importantly, he had deep domain expertise in Chinese corporate networks from 12 years of on-the-ground reporting in Shanghai. That outpaced virtually every government agency he sought to work with. As a result, David was uniquely situated to identify the gap he found.
For more on Wirescreen: https://wirescreen.ai/
Follow David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-barboza-7bba4325
Follow Bradley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleymartinez/
Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
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