San Francisco, Calif., Jan. 31, 2024 - Reken, an AI & cybersecurity company, today announced the close of its $10M oversubscribed seed round, led by Greycroft and FPV Ventures.
The funding will be used for core research and development to build new AI technology and products to protect against generative AI threats, such as deepfake social engineering and autonomous fraud.
Reken's backers include top venture capital funds led by many early Google employees and Google-connected investors, including Wesley Chan, Hunter Walk & Satya Patel, Eva Ho, and Gokul Rajaram.
Greycroft partner and Bay Area head, Marcie Vu, who helped lead Google's IPO, joins the Reken board.
Reken was founded in January by Ghosemajumder and Rich Griffiths.
The two helped build Shape from its early stages into the leading AI bot defense platform, which was acquired by F5 for $1B in 2020.
About Reken: Reken is building a new category of AI products and platform to protect against generative AI threats.
About Greycroft: Greycroft is a seed-to-growth venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs who are striving to build category-defining companies across intelligent consumer and enterprise applications, AI infrastructure, sustainability, and consumer products.
Greycroft has raised over $3 billion in capital, including the recent closing on over $980 million across its core flagship vehicles, Greycroft Partners VII and Greycroft Growth IV, enabling the firm to invest in software businesses that are taking advantage of advancements in artificial intelligence.
Recent Greycroft investments in the Bay Area in artificial intelligence include Together AI, Peer AI, Character.
About FPV: FPV is a new $450 million fund focused on backing and serving mission-driven founders throughout their entire journey.
Founded by Wesley Chan and Pegah Ebrahimi, the firm has backed well-known, high-impact startups including Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, Xilis, and Manifold Bio.
About Shuman Ghosemajumder: Shuman Ghosemajumder is co-founder and CEO of Reken, an AI & cybersecurity company building a new category of products and platform to protect against generative AI threats.
As an early Google employee, he helped build Gmail and grow AdSense.
As Global Head of Product for Trust & Safety, he started the Trust & Safety product group, protecting over $20B/year in revenue and over 1B users.
He was later CTO of Shape Security, an AI cybersecurity company protecting the largest banks, airlines, and federal agencies against sophisticated bots.
He helped build Shape from a pre-product startup to its $1B acquisition by F5. After the acquisition, he became F5's GM & Global Head of Artificial Intelligence.
He founded their AI & Data product group, building products leveraging over 500PB/day of data from F5 products powering the world's largest websites.
TeachAids builds free, research-based public health education software used in 82 countries, helping educate more than 500 million people.
Shuman is co-author of CGI Programming Unleashed, a contributing author to Crimeware, and has written for publications such as Harvard Business Review, Vox, and VentureBeat.
This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:43:04 +0000