In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of America's top spy agency, the CIA, is an undisclosed investor in hot cloud-computing startups Mesosphere and Docker, reports The Intercept.
Mesosphere and Docker are very well-funded San Francisco-based companies, with valuations that are said to be at or above $1 billion.
Why the CIA would be so interested in these companies, we can only guess. But the agency does invest in lots of enterprise-software businesses, including Palantir, the secretive data-mining startup.
The report also highlights that Mesosphere and Docker have previously unmentioned customer deals with government agencies. Mesosphere has a $90,000 deal with the US Department of the Treasury, while Docker has a sole-source deal with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to provide its technology.
Those deals are publicly viewable, per US transparency laws, but had gone unnoticed.
Most recently, Mesosphere raised a $73.5 million investment...
