Kindred Tech uses AI and MongoDB to fight child exploitation in India

Faced with a surge in online child exploitation in India, law enforcement agencies are turning to advanced AI-powered tools to accelerate investigations and deliver justice. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Indian institutions received 2.2 million cyberchips related to abuse in 2024.

Katalyst, an AI-driven digital investigation platform developed by Kindred Tech, is playing a pivotal role in addressing this issue. Kindred Tech is a nonprofit organization that builds cutting-edge tools for law enforcement and NGOs to combat online child exploitation, human trafficking, and other technological abuses.

Manual processing of cybertip reports is time-consuming and resource-intensive for law enforcement officials. Each report contains an average of 35 pages of information, much of which may not be directly relevant, but a single hidden piece of data can provide important clues to investigators.

Katalyst's main function is to automate the ingestion and prioritization of cyberchips, which can save authorities time, increase resource efficiency, and deliver a variety of better outcomes. This includes identifying a victim, a stronger evidence package for a trial, or getting someone out of a harmful situation.

Katalyst provides law enforcement with four key capabilities:

Advanced case management tools
secure media library
Classifying sensitive media using AI
Automated computer forensics support

These capabilities streamline investigations, surface actionable insights, and help agencies efficiently process large amounts of digital evidence. Katalyst also allows investigators to automate case workflows, bridging technology gaps and facilitating a more coordinated cross-jurisdictional response.

At the core of Katalyst is MongoDB Atlas' AI-enabled data infrastructure that can easily scale to meet the demands of modern environments using both structured and unstructured data. MongoDB also supports all of Katalyst's AI capabilities, allowing Kindred Tech to store AI inferences alongside raw case data, perform vector-based similarity searches for victim IDs, and train, tune, and deploy models more efficiently. These capabilities are important to Katalyst to quickly provide a coordinated response to combat online child exploitation.

In India, the impact of this platform is already evident. In 2024, the Kerala Police's Center for Combating Child Sexual Exploitation (CCSE) began an 18-month pilot project with Katalyst. During this period, investigators utilized Katalyst to significantly improve the number of cases they were able to solve. This included 96 arrests, the protection of 20 children and the issuing of 18 international referrals. The initiative won the 2023 Technology Sabah Excellence Award for its innovative use of technology to protect children.

“Kindred Tech's mission is to provide investigators and law enforcement with the tools to uncover insights faster and ensure every child case receives the emergency response it needs,” said Bree Atkinson, CEO of Kindred Tech. “MongoDB allows us to combine the power of AI with existing data, allowing Katalyst to uncover critical insights faster, allowing Indian investigators to spend less time buried in data and more time protecting children.”

MongoDB's offline capabilities enable Katalyst to remain effective in low-connectivity, resource-constrained environments, enabling investigators to act decisively in difficult situations. This feature will enable field use by law enforcement agencies across India and beyond.

“Efforts to protect children are a race against time, but legacy systems and siled data often cause significant delays,” said Sachin Chawla, Vice President, India and ASEAN, MongoDB. “We are incredibly proud of the way Kindred Tech combines the superior field work of law enforcement with modern data platforms and AI to instantly turn vast amounts of digital evidence into life-saving insights.”

Looking ahead, Kindred Tech plans to expand Katalyst to at least three more Indian states over the next year. We also plan to enhance Katalyst's capabilities with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search for image matching. This enables real-time cross-border investigations and leverages predictive analytics to transform investigative responses at scale.

Headquartered in New York, MongoDB's mission is to help innovators create, transform, and disrupt industries with software. MongoDB's unified database platform is built to power next-generation applications and is the most widely available globally distributed database on the market. MongoDB provides integrated operational data, search, real-time analytics, and AI-powered data acquisition to help organizations move faster, innovate more efficiently, and simplify complex architectures everywhere. Millions of developers and over 50,000 customers across all industries, including over 75% of Fortune 100 companies, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications.

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