A London-based firm pioneering synthetic threat intelligence – the use of AI-generated data to simulate real-world cyber threats – has raised a £3m seed funding round.
Innerworks, led by a trio of founders with expertise in AI and decentralisation, will now look to scale its mission of delivering the world’s most effective ‘immune system for the internet’.
The round was led by AlbionVC and saw participation from multiple other firms, along with angels from companies including Citi, UBS and Apple.
Founded by Oliver Quie (CEO), Oscar Hayek (CTO), and Tom Ryan (chief product officer), the business has developed breakthrough technology to combat sophisticated AI-powered fraud that bypasses conventional security systems.
The company has already proven impactful, partnering with incident response firm ZeroShadow to detect activity linked to North Korean money launderers behind a $1.5bn hack – the largest cryptocurrency heist in history.
Innerworks’ synthetic threat intelligence tackles telling real human behavior apart from AI-generated interactions that look just like the real thing.
This threat is growing fast, with deepfake fraud attempts having jumped by over 2,000% since 2022.
Central to the synthetic threat intelligence platform is RedTeam – the world’s first crypto-bounty platform for adversarial AI hacking.
Fresh £125m for GoFibre to expand connectivity in rural Scotland
The program harnesses a global network of ethical hackers and AI agents that continuously probe for weaknesses, attack Innerworks’ systems and contribute to its evolving defences.
Innerworks has achieved a 97% detection rate against AI threats, outperforming the accuracy of multibillion-dollar companies and all top five incumbent providers in head-to-head comparisons.
“We’re facing AI-powered deception that can mimic legitimate users with frightening accuracy,” said Quie.
“Existing security companies have become obsolete because they assume threats will behave differently than legitimate users. Our platform solves this problem using synthetic threat intelligence and decentralised training to defend against even the most sophisticated AI-based attacks.
“Having now proven our approach alongside global brands, we feel Innerworks is well positioned to become core security infrastructure for the wider internet helping to protect user ecosystems online.”
Innerworks plans to use the funding to accelerate product development, expand the RedTeam ecosystem and scale its presence across global financial centers.
Key priorities include expanding the platform’s adversarial training capabilities and building strategic partnerships with tier-one financial institutions that are looking to combat synthetic threats.
Cat Mcdonald, partner at AlbionVC, added: “We invested in Innerworks because they’re not incrementally improving fraud detection, they’re fundamentally reimagining it.
“Their ability to detect what other systems miss represents an essential new security layer for the financial sector’s response to this new threat landscape.”