Recorded Future

Recorded Future is the world's largest threat intelligence company, headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, providing real-time, AI-powered cyber threat intelligence to businesses and government organizations. Founded in 2009, the company was acquired by Mastercard in December 2024 for $2.65 billion, integrating its threat intelligence capabilities with Mastercard's global payment network fraud detection infrastructure.

Recorded Future serves over 1,900 organizations across more than 75 countries, including government intelligence agencies, financial institutions, technology companies, healthcare systems, and critical infrastructure operators. The Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud ingests and analyzes open web, dark web, technical, and proprietary sources—processing tens of millions of new data points daily—using natural language processing and machine learning to identify emerging threats, track adversary groups, and deliver actionable intelligence.

Core use cases include brand protection, supply chain risk management, vulnerability prioritization, incident response enrichment, and threat actor profiling. In 2025, Mastercard launched Mastercard Threat Intelligence—a unified product combining Recorded Future's cyber threat data with Mastercard's fraud signals—to help banks detect and prevent cyber-enabled payment fraud at scale.

Recorded Future integrates with leading SIEM, SOAR, and ticketing platforms and holds FedRAMP Authorization, SOC 2 Type II, and ISO 27001 certifications, employing approximately 1,000–1,500 people globally. Recorded Future is an intelligence supplier rather than a detection or response product, so it does not compete with the endpoint, network and email vendors in this category — it feeds them.

Its real comparison set is Mandiant Threat Intelligence, Flashpoint and Intel 471, and the decision turns on source coverage and analyst tooling rather than on detection efficacy. Licensing is unusually visible for this market: its AWS Marketplace listing publishes 36-month contract prices per intelligence module and seat band, ranging from Vulnerability Intelligence for up to four users at $168,750 to External Identity Intelligence covering up to one million identities at $393,750, which makes module scope rather than headcount the dominant cost driver.

Best fit: organisations with a dedicated threat-intelligence function that can act on feeds, and financial institutions that want cyber and payment-fraud signals correlated — the clearest differentiator created by the Mastercard acquisition.