“How on earth did I end up running an AI company?” Robert Bassett Cross asks himself as he sits down over coffee.

For the former army officer and special operations expert, it’s been an unlikely journey. He spent years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan before launching what could be the UK’s next bet in big data and artificial intelligence.

Unsurprisingly, Bassett Cross does not come across as your typical tech chief executive. The Silicon Valley uniform of sandals and T-shirts won’t do for the ex-military man, who later worked as an investment banker at JP Morgan. He cuts a disciplined, hard-nosed figure.

His new venture - Adarga - uses AI to change the way intelligence agencies and defence companies tackle terrorism, helping crunch vast amounts of data to identify suspects, hot spots and dangers even before they occur.

Adarga, which comes from the word for an old Moorish shield, is a London and Bristol based start-up. The venture is just emerging from stealth-mode, largely keeping its technology - which is already being used by the UK government - under wraps as it fine tunes the technology.

The aim is to use big data to head off terror threats before they even begin. The same technology can also be applied in financial analysis, the insurance industry and a host of other areas, he says.