The Securities and Exchange Commission has struck a five year, $90 million contract with big data outfit Palantir Technologies to help it sniff out insider trading, according to Reuters.
The agreement will expand on a pilot contract between the two which began in early 2014, says Reuters, citing a source.
With a growing mountain of data to trawl through to catch scams such as insider trading, pyramid schemes and pump-and-dump operations, the regulator has turned to Palantir's analysis software.
Co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2004, Palantir grew out of the software used by online payment provider PayPal to detect fraudulent transactions. Earlier this year it completed a massive $450 million funding round that values the company at $20 billion.
Over the years it has won large contracts with US government agencies and a number of investment banks including Citi as well as both Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg and several quantitative trading hedge funds.