In May, the company experienced backlash and suspending of contracts after Patton's membership in the Ku Klux Klan and participation in a drive-by terrorist attack on a synagogue was revealed.
[3] A 2021 audit requested by the State of Utah that tried to assess algorithmic bias in the AI declared that "Banjo does not use techniques that meet the industry definition of artificial Intelligence".
[1][4][5] After building a "friend-finding" app called Peer Compass for a Las Vegas hackathon in 2010 and then a Google hackathon in 2011 (the app won both events),[3][6] Damien Patton founded Banjo as a social media application for phones to aggregate and discover live events by scraping public, geotagged content from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Path, Google Plus, VKontakte and EyeEm, then indexed by location, time and content.
[10] After attending South by Southwest in 2011 and seeing other friend-finding apps like Glancee, Sonar, and Highlight, Patton told his investors in 2012 that he was pivoting to Banjo and fired all but one employee.
[13][6][14] He also said the company quickly uncovered the 2014 Shooting of Michael Brown, and was alerted about the 2015 East Village gas explosion 58 minutes before the Associated Press reported it.
In March 2014 the company completed a $16 million Series B round of financing from Balderton Capital with BlueRun Ventures investing again and VegasTechFund as a new investor.
[15][16][6][17][18][19] A profile of Patton in 2015 called him a "damn good driver" and gave an anecdote about their software uncovering a Florida State University shooting in 2014, explaining that is why NBC and ESPN were paying customers.
[22] In March 2020, VICE's Motherboard uncovered a "shadow company" named Pink Unicorn Labs that developed apps for iPhone and Android with no outward connection to Banjo.
[36] In April 2020, Matt Stroud of OneZero uncovered CEO Patton's involvement with the Nashville, Tennessee-based Dixie Knights chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
In June 1992, when Patton was 17, he drove Grand Knight Leonard William Armstrong during a drive-by shooting with a TEC-9 on the West End Synagogue.
[3] Patton confirmed his membership in the KKK and involvement with the white power skinheads, which he called "the foot soldiers for groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations".
OneZero republished a picture printed in The Tennessean of Patton at an Aryan Nations meeting where he and other members are giving the Nazi salute.
Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes suspended the $20 million contract in late April 2020 after the KKK ties came out and would review its use.
Other historic Silicon Valley links to far-right ideology mentioned include Jeffrey Epstein, William Shockley, and James Damore.