The full China OSINT course is live. And there’s something bigger behind it.
This was never just a course. Here's the company underneath it. Terton Intelligence has arrived.
Hello Readers,
I am sure you have heard about Terton Intelligence and the China OSINT course. Terton Intelligence has become synonymous with the China OSINT course; actually, the company is much more than just the course. Let me explain.
Most of you found me because of the China OSINT course. Fair enough, it’s what I’ve talked about the most in public. But if I’m honest, the course was never really the point. It’s the wedge. The company underneath it is Terton Intelligence, and the actual product, the one I’ve been building this whole time quietly, is called Argus.
Check out Terton Intelligence here: www.tertonintel.com
How this actually started
I launched Terton in May with no funding and as a non-technical founder. And if I’m being fully transparent, little background in commercial software. But I have been building bots and scrapers for my work for years, which I have used in my journalism and consulting. I have finally decided to step out of the shadows and venture into the world of large-scale commercial software offering and start-ups.
Before this, I spent years as a journalist covering East Asia and China (I was the first non-American, non-Asian correspondent Newsweek ever assigned to the region and based in Taipei), so my actual skill set going into this was reporting and source verification, not database design or writing code. I taught myself the technical side as I went, mostly by breaking things and fixing them again, just to get something working.
I bring this up because it tells you how the company actually runs day to day. I’d rather sit with a problem and figure it out myself than wait around for the “right” hire to show up or chase a funding round before doing anything real.
The world of media changed around me and I felt the need to go in a direction that respects my experience and knowledge. Sometimes you break things and test your assumptions to reinvent yourself.
The China OSINT course ended up being the first proof that this approach works at all. It made money in the very first month the company existed, and it wasn’t a handful of hobbyists signing up either. Several were working analysts already in cybersecurity and threat intel. That told me something. It meant the exact audience Argus needed already existed, and they showed up before I’d even opened the platform to anyone.
Today, there are professionals from around the world pursuing this course, and many more who have heard about it and are mulling over signing up.
So what is Argus, actually
This is the part most people who took the course haven’t seen yet.
Argus is a strategic and dual-use intelligence platform, which will serve as a B2B platform helping clients across the world. In plain terms, it tracks where military capability and commercial industry overlap across East Asia (China first), and it organizes that information so someone can actually use it instead of digging through fifty browser tabs and half-translated PDFs. The PLA Orbat showcases the powerful analytics that Argus will carry as a mature threat intelligence, due diligence and interconnected intelligence platform for a whole of industry and government clients.
The centerpiece right now is the PLA Order of Battle. It’s a geolocated database covering thousands of facilities, bases, garrisons, and units, mapped across all five theater commands and structured the way the real joint command hierarchy works, not some simplified list someone threw together for a slide deck. Past ORBAT, we’re pushing into drone systems intelligence and mapping dual-use hardware and semiconductor supply chains too, because that’s genuinely where a lot of the risk conversation in this region is headed, even if not everyone’s caught up to that yet.
Argus is building a waste database of Chinese companies with ties with PRC government and its military. Argus will deploy powerful AI-layer to find interconnections otherwise hidden behind Chinese databases.
I believe in disrupting the industry which is heavily focused on analysts sitting in global hubs like New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore. The time has come to disrupt threat intelligence, commercial due-diligence and government-sponsored analysis world.
Why bring this up now?
Because new things are shipping under Argus soon, and they build directly off what the course already teaches. If you’ve worked through the modules, you already have the instincts to understand what Argus is showing you. That’s not really an accident; it was sort of the plan from the start, even if I never said it out loud until now.
If you are a VC fund or interested in investing in Terton Intelligence and what I am building, please reach out for a pitch deck. Terton Intelligence is searching for a co-founder if there is a right fit.
If any of this is interesting to you and you want a look at what’s coming next, just reply to this email. I’m letting a small group in early, and honestly, I’d rather it be people who already get the tradecraft than folks encountering this cold for the first time.
Talk soon.