News alert: Reken raises $10M from Greycroft to protect against generative AI-enabled fraud – Source: securityboulevard.com

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. Other investors in the round include Firebolt Ventures, Fika Ventures, Omega Venture Partners, Homebrew, and JAZZ Venture Partners.

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.

“Generative AI cybercrime poses the greatest security challenge of our time,” said Shuman Ghosemajumder, co-founder & CEO of Reken. “While billions have been spent on security products, the impact of cybercrime has actually been getting worse. The reality is that existing cybersecurity doesn’t work as well as we’d like against even yesterday’s threats, let alone against new attacks based on generative AI. For threats such as deepfake video, audio, images, phishing, and fraud, it’s clear that we need a new approach.”

Reken’s backers include top venture capital funds led by many early Google employees and Google-connected investors, including Wesley Chan (FPV), Hunter Walk & Satya Patel (Homebrew), Eva Ho (Fika), and Gokul Rajaram.

Google DeepMind executive Jon Steinback (Sequoia Capital Scout Fund) and Vishal Vasishth (co-founder, Obvious Ventures) also invested in the round. Greycroft partner and Bay Area head, Marcie Vu, who helped lead Google’s IPO, joins the Reken board.

“Safeguarding against generative AI threats is essential for the future of the internet,” said Vu. “Reken’s founders have unparalleled experience building large-scale AI platforms to defend against sophisticated attacks for some of the world’s largest companies. Shuman and Rich are uniquely positioned to build an important company that will help tackle the evolving challenges presented by generative AI threats, which will only increase over time. Reken’s mission strongly aligns with Greycroft’s core focus on artificial intelligence.”

Reken was founded in January by Ghosemajumder (formerly Google’s Global Head of Product for Trust & Safety; Head of AI at F5; and CTO at Shape Security) and Rich Griffiths (formerly VP of Product at Shape Security). 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. For more information, please visit https://reken.ai.

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.AI, Contextual AI, Rembrand, and Merly.AI. For more information, please visit https://www.greycroft.com.

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 (former Google product leader who founded Google Analytics and Google Voice) and Pegah Ebrahimi (former COO and CIO of Morgan Stanley Tech Banking and COO of Cisco Collaboration), the firm has backed well-known, high-impact startups including Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, Xilis, and Manifold Bio. For more information, please visit https://fpvventures.com.

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.

Shuman is also co-founder and chairman of TeachAids, an educational technology NGO spun out of Stanford University. 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 (Macmillan Publishing), a contributing author to Crimeware (Symantec Publishing), and has written for publications such as Harvard Business Review, Vox, and VentureBeat. He is also a regular guest lecturer at Stanford. He is a graduate of MIT and in 2011 was named by The Boston Globe to their MIT150 list of the top MIT innovators of the past 150 years.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Last Watchdog authored by bacohido. Read the original post at: https://www.lastwatchdog.com/news-alert-reken-raises-10m-from-greycroft-to-protect-against-generative-ai-enabled-fraud/