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TheDataProject.AI

company

Making government and public data accessible and searchable

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Why I started this

Back in 2008, Scott Leonard, Brayton Johnson, and Kevin O'Connor started FindTheBest, which eventually became Graphiq. They specialized in ingesting complex databases and making them easily accessible to users. Doing for raw data what Kayak did for travel and Zillow did for real estate, we built over a hundred vertical search engines. Without realizing it at the time, we had also constructed the world's largest Knowledge Graph. As voice assistants like Siri and Alexa grew in popularity, our approach became highly valuable. We sold Graphiq to Amazon in 2017 to power question-and-answer features for Alexa, and it remains a core part of Amazon AI today. Following the acquisition, Amazon decommissioned all of our original websites. A few years ago, Kian O'Connor (son of Kevin) teamed up with Scott Leonard to recreate that platform as TheDataProject.ai. Together, they have already launched dozens of sites. It is amazing to see what modern tools make possible—two people completely rebuilt a massive data infrastructure that once took a team of a hundred to run.

About TheDataProject.AI

TheDataProject.AI is a transparency organization that transforms raw government datasets into searchable web platforms for researchers, journalists, and citizens. By leveraging artificial intelligence to process public records, the company bypasses traditional barriers like paywalls and inaccessible file formats. Its portfolio of 134 data platforms makes 375M public records completely free and accessible, covering federal spending, healthcare costs, and uncollected property. The organization sources its information directly from authoritative federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Census Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among its major focus areas is the healthcare sector, where it maintains dedicated tools tracking Medicare provider payments, analyzing drug prescriber behavior, and monitoring adverse vaccine event reports. These platforms expose potential fraud and spending anomalies by applying sophisticated machine learning pipelines to massive troves of payment records. Alongside healthcare data, the organization provides extensive visibility into government operations through directories of federal workforce salaries, comprehensive trackers of national spending, and searchable databases of lobbying expenditures and immigration court cases. By parsing massive data dumps like federal budget logs and turning them into intuitive dashboards, the company enables the public to track exactly where taxpayer money is going and who is receiving it. Beyond direct government transparency, TheDataProject.AI builds targeted intelligence tools for specific industries and civic use cases. For example, building-products teams can access daily-refreshed sales intelligence derived from construction permits, which classifies market segments and ranks contractor volumes to help businesses identify new opportunities. Meanwhile, voters and political watchdogs can trace individual campaign contributions, track super PAC activity, and monitor political vendor payments through its election finance platforms. The organization also maintains robust databases for genealogical research, allowing individuals to search through 114.9M vital records without the subscription fees typically charged by commercial ancestry services. Financial professionals and consumers alike can dive into business filings, venture capital directories, and analyses of special purpose acquisition companies to understand complex corporate movements. By automating the deployment of these platforms, TheDataProject.AI has rapidly scaled its coverage to include verticals such as food safety, agricultural subsidies, software reviews, and transportation infrastructure. Its transportation tools track aircraft registrations, vehicle safety recalls, and autonomous vehicle crash reports, while its financial hubs index unclaimed property, consumer complaints, and public pension data. The organization also publishes in-depth original reporting and analytical articles based on its findings, covering topics like the true cost of historical conflicts, the financial impact of trade tariffs, and the extent to which artificial intelligence threatens existing occupations across 50 states. Ultimately, TheDataProject.AI serves as a comprehensive bridge between opaque government data silos and the public that has a fundamental right to understand them, proving that civic technology can operate at a massive scale when powered by modern software development.