President Donald Trump’s tariffs have underscored the increasing geopolitical risk that almost all businesses now face. As the situation continues to shift with Trump’s unpredictable deal-making, it’s also becoming clear how challenging it is for companies, nonprofits, consultants, and lawyers to keep up with the rapid day-to-day changes.
“We are drowning in trade updates every hour of every day,” Matthew Oresman, London managing partner of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a global law firm, told TechCrunch.
The firm, whose clients span multinationals and high-net-worth individuals, as well as companies in tech, energy, and AI, is one of the first customers for London-based startup Hence AI’s new software product, Hence Global. The product uses AI to help organizations monitor geopolitical and business risk.
The tool does two things. First, it helps companies of any size track risk, and it advises them on actions they can take to mitigate that risk. Second, it helps service providers, like consulting and law firms, generate meaningful analysis about the world for their clients.
Sean West, CEO and co-founder of Hence AI (formerly Hence Technologies), said to think of Hence Global as “an AI-powered business advisor that’s riding alongside you.” At only $1,500 per year for the base product, Hence is far more affordable than your typical consultant, argued West.
“We want to democratize access to this information,” West told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview, noting that organizations like startups and NGOs can’t afford to call their lawyers every time they have a question about exposure or spend half a million dollars on a consulting contract.
“Big companies know how to buy expensive advice, and the richest people will always talk to the smartest people, and they’ll pay for them,” West continued. “But most of the market can actually be served by technology.”
West previously served as global deputy CEO of geopolitical advisory firm Eurasia Group and recently published a book, “Unruly: Fighting Back when Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business.” One of his co-founders, Steve Heitkamp, is a Palantir alum with a background in political risk and counterterrorism.
Hence Global is built on Palantir’s Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows the startup to blend different AI models to understand, summarize, and analyze relevant information based on a customer’s specific needs and industry. The system pulls in data from news headlines (and only the headlines, with a link to the source, says West), Wikipedia, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, press releases, and other public data like sanctions lists or World Bank information.
West walked me through how the product works to show its potential impact. Customers start by creating a persona. For the purposes of the demo, we told the system that we were a cross-border cryptocurrency infrastructure company that offers stablecoin payments, crypto custody, and regulatory intelligence. We also told Hence Global that we wanted “a continuous, forward-looking analysis of geopolitical developments that could impact our operating environment,” and gave it a handful of topics to track.
The idea is that, every day, Hence Global will generate a daily update with relevant news and information. In the case of the fictional crypto company, one of the stories the software flagged was that Trump’s trade war caused market volatility that resulted in Bitcoin and other crypto stocks falling.
“Basically, it does the work that a mid-level analyst would have done in my organization,” West said. He added that it would’ve taken said analyst all day to produce a memo that Hence Global churns out in a minute.
Hence Global’s daily briefing is great for companies that want to understand their own geopolitical and business risk, but it’s also helpful for services companies that are tracking this information for their clients.
Crucially, when a customer asks Hence Global to monitor a company, the system asks if that company is a client, a competitor, or a supplier, which will cause the platform to think about how it provides information and analyses differently.
“We were desperate for these kinds of tools that can synthesize [information], help us write the client alerts, give us that big kernel of information that we can augment and put our legal knowledge on,” Oresman said. “There’s just a fire hose of information out there. Having something like this actually gets it to a water fountain so we can actually do something useful with it.”
Hence Global hasn’t been live for more than a couple of months, but Trump’s tariff situation has already begun bringing in new clients on top of existing customers like TravelPerk, Diversifi Capital, and Three Crowns.
Rohitesh Dhawan, CEO of the International Council on Metals and Mining, told TechCrunch he uses Hence Global to monitor market sentiment and policy.
“We try to show the world that it is possible to produce mining in a responsible way,” Dhawan said. “But to do that, you’ve got to be really well connected to the pulse of society and what people care about and the issues that are top of mind, and that’s why we turn to Hence as a way to help us do that, because things are just moving so quickly in the world in general.”
Dhawan likened Hence Global to Uber Eats — a product you didn’t know you needed until it showed up and made your life easier. He said that businesses in resource-based industries, like agriculture or oil and gas, and companies that are highly regulated or highly exposed to public sentiment, such as tech startups, would benefit most from using Hence Global.
“This was the kind of always-on monitoring that we just weren’t doing before,” Dhawan said. “What Hence is helping me do as a CEO is to quickly get to the, ‘So what?’”
Hence Global is the startup’s second product after Hence Legal, a “solution for outside counsel management, matter management, and litigation management,” per West. Hence AI, whose team is spread around the U.K., Rwanda, the U.S., and the Netherlands, has raised about $5.2 million to date and is actively looking to raise more for this product from investors who align with its mission.
When asked about whether Hence AI would be open to being acquired by larger research houses, consultancies, or law firms, West said he and his team are less interested in going in-house at any one organization.
“We’re trying to do big things,” he added. “And I think the big opportunity here is tapping the market of people who are global, but can’t access advice. And I don’t think that necessarily is what a large corporate service provider would do with this.”