Years of iterating
& now this.

You may have landed here looking for a tool called Vortimo, or Skylight, or OSINT-Tool. They were all the same idea, tried three different ways, across nine years. Two of them are deprecated now. The third one is in use, and it's called Ubikron.

TL;DR

9

years on the same idea

...and we landed on Ubikron →
Read the story ↓

Hard yards

Today we are thrilled to introduce our final product. Following years of re-design and testing, we are confident that it is positioned to become the next great contender in our industry.

2017 → 2026 · 3 products · 1 idea

Everything below is dated and shipped, not pitched: a talk in 2017, a company in 2019, a full rebuild in 2022 and a working product today. This is the difference between a new idea and a tested one. If you arrived here from osint-tool.com or vortimo.com, this is why: those products are closed chapters, kept here as proof of work.

So, where are we now? We're at Ubikron.

Open Ubikron →

EXHIBIT A — THE ORIGINAL IDEA

A browser that organizes the web by information, not by site.

It started as a talk, in April 2017, with a slide that asked one question: if you had a fresh start — would you really build a browser like we have it today? Every browser you've ever used organizes the internet the same way: by site. You go to one address, then another, then another — and whatever you learn along the way is scattered across a hundred tabs with no memory of how it connects.

'The Whole Internet' -- a data visualisation used in the 2017 talk to illustrate the scale of the idea
What "all the data on the internet" actually looks like.

Two problems, both structural: you can't easily pull "all the information on the internet" into one place, and you can't build a new browser when the web's protocols are designed per-site, not per-topic.

So the plan changed: instead of a browser for the internet's information, build a browser for the information you've already browsed. That version could actually be built — as a plugin, sitting inside the browsers people already used. The company built to do that was named Vortimo.

EXHIBIT B — THREE ATTEMPTS

The case file, in order.

APRIL 2017 THE TALK

Before the company or the product, there was an idea.

The idea has a paper trail: a talk called "Bitching about how we consume information on the internet today," given in April 2017. The pitch was simple — imagine unlimited access to a data store filled with all the data on the internet, with no websites or webpages, just the data. You've never seen the concept of a browser. You have unlimited engineering resources. If you had a fresh start, would you really build a browser like the one we have?

Contact sheet of slides from the April 2017 talk, covering how browsers render information per-site, losing history, and the problem of saving state
The deck, in full. April 2017.

Don't take our word for it. Someone in the room live-tweeted the talk at KPN's Guest Hacker Program, timestamp and all.

A tweet by Oscar Koeroo dated 12 April 2017: 'Nu in de @kpn Guest Hacker Program: Roelof Temmingh van @Paterva, maker van Maltego.' with two photos of Roelof presenting
Contemporaneous, third-party, dated. April 12, 2017.

Verdict: right questions, nothing concrete.

JAN 2019 – DEC 2021 VORTIMO

The gold standard that took three years to complete.

Vortimo became a full investigation platform: a browser extension that live captured entire pages as MHTML snapshots, ran named-entity recognition to pull out names, emails, phone numbers, crypto addresses and coordinates, and stored it all in a local database you could tag, filter, search and graph. An automated crawler called AutoVort could work through hundreds of URLs unattended. Everything exported as court-ready evidence packs with cryptographic hashes.

It was, by a wide margin, the most in-depth tool of the time. It was also too much, too heavy to install, too complex. Investigators opened it, saw the density of the interface and the size of the resulting database, and closed it again. The idea was proven but the product wasn't usable.

Annotated screenshot of the real Vortimo interface, showing URLs/domains visited, extracted objects, and a visit timeline
UI was never our forte
Annotated screenshot of Vortimo's tile mode, showing replay, selection, tagging, and the action menu on captured pages
UI was *dense*
DISCONTINUED

Verdict: too complex, too much data, too heavy on client compute platform. Many tears.

JAN 2022 – JUL 2023 SKYLIGHT → OSINT-TOOL

The opposite bet: cut the fat to the bone.

What began as Skylight and was later rebranded OSINT-Tool answered Vortimo's biggest complaint directly. No install, no local database, no learning curve — just a Chromium extension paired with a lookup web app, updating itself quietly through the Chrome Web Store. It even added something Vortimo never had: a history graph built from your actual navigation path, not just extracted entities.

But lightness had a price. There was no page archiving, so if a site changed or a post got deleted, the evidence was gone unless you'd taken a screenshot. No full-text search. No tagging. No multiple investigations at once. Everything lived in one local browser, which made it nearly impossible to hand a case to someone else. Two years in, the tool was showing its age, and the data it collected had nowhere else to go.

Screenshot of the real OSINT-Tool extension, showing the thumbnail grid and extracted objects panel for a live investigation
Simpler, and it shows — but it shipped.
The History Graph feature, showing connected pages and a popup confirming Vortimo was founded in 2019 by Roelof Temmingh
The History Graph, mid-investigation.
DISCONTINUED

Verdict: too light to hold a real investigation, and too local to share.

AUG 2023 – PRESENT UBIKRON

Same idea, built by the same team, aimed at what actually broke.

Ubikron was another rewrite, this time carrying the hard-won lessons of two previous attempts. The architecture is deliberately split. A battle-tested database sits on a high-capacity server that the client writes to, with clean separation between client and server. And for those who need to keep everything in-house, there's a self-hostable Docker stack.

That one change fixes what killed both earlier attempts. It keeps Vortimo's depth — entity extraction, case notes, link-analysis graph view — without the local-only ceiling that made OSINT-Tool a dead end. The pro version now adds a full visual graph, one-click enrichment APIs, and an MCP server so AI assistants can work the case alongside you.

Ubikron Pro split view: AI Insight chat, an entity graph, and a cited report on an investigation
AI Insight, live on a real graph.
Ubikron Pro enrichment panel showing breach-database widgets (DeHashed, EmailRep, Hunter) feeding a linked entity graph
One-click enrichment, feeding the graph.
ACTIVE

Status: in active development. This one seems to stick around.

Roelof Temmingh

"I've built the same idea three times now, but that's just how much I believe in this."

Roelof Temmingh

Maltego, then Vortimo, now Ubikron.