Our Series B, and the Future of Security Awareness in the Age of AI

Our Mission

Adaptive’s mission is to stop AI-powered social engineering.

Cyber attacks using deepfakes and generative AI are growing astonishingly fast. As a result, we’re accelerating our product and team to keep pace with attackers.

Today, Adaptive Security announced an $81M Series B from new investors NVIDIA, Bain Capital Ventures, Capital One Ventures and Citi Ventures, alongside participation from existing investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund, Abstract Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Momentum

Less than one year after our public launch, Adaptive now protects over 500 enterprise customers.

We’re honored to work with security leaders at organizations including PayPal, Bose, the NHL, Xerox, Figma, Ramp, Vimeo, Perplexity, and many others. We are listening closely to their feedback to make our product better every day. 

The Shift to AI-Powered Social Engineering

In 2023, we met with hundreds of CISOs to understand their biggest problems. One issue came up repeatedly: AI-powered social engineering.

Historically, people experienced  social engineering via email phishing. And so, security tools focused on blocking malicious links and filtering spam. Attacks were often detectable—poor grammar, generic language, obvious tells.

That world no longer exists.

With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the public found its new favorite productivity tool. LLMs have exploded in use; today, you can access over 2 million models on Hugging Face. Unfortunately, with that, cyber criminals now have a really effective way to run sophisticated attacks. 

In 2024, deepfake-enabled attacks increased 17 fold, with more than 100,000 incidents in the U.S. alone. Eighteen months ago, only about 1 in 10 CISOs had seen a sophisticated deepfake attack. Today, it's more than half.

Attacks are no longer limited to email. We’re seeing increasing use of SMS, voice calls, and even video conferencing—channels that are often lightly protected or completely unmanaged. In one widely reported incident, attackers used a series of deepfakes during a Zoom call to steal $25 million from a company.

Social engineering accounts for over 95% of successful cyber breaches, and more than half of our customer conversations include firsthand reports of deepfake incidents. These attacks affect everyone—from frontline employees to executives—using cloned voices, fabricated videos, and highly personalized scams.

Defending Against AI-Powered Social Engineering

Adaptive’s platform gives you everything you need to prevent AI-powered social engineering attacks. 

We start by helping organizations understand their true exposure. Adaptive continuously analyzes open-source intelligence and company-specific data to identify what attackers can see and weaponize—across executives, employees, and the broader organization. These data points can be information like your phone number, headshot, and voice recording: everything needed to orchestrate an authentic deepfake attack. 

Next, Adaptive safely simulates the AI-powered cyber attacks we’re seeing in the real world. We run realistic email, SMS, and voice phishing simulations—each with personalized deepfake scenarios—so security teams can expose their teams to these new threats in a safe environment. 

If an employee fails a simulation, Adaptive can adjust the user’s risk score, restrict access controls, and deliver targeted, personalized training tied directly to what they experienced. Instead of generic awareness content, employees learn how to recognize their own executives' cloned voices, fabricated urgency, and highly tailored scams based on real attack patterns. Adaptive users can even generate entirely new trainings from scratch using our AI content creator. 

Adaptive products are enterprise-grade and built for a global workforce. Both our training and phishing platforms are available in 39+ languages with audited accessibility controls, roles-based administrative access, and integrations into leading SAAS tools. 

Finally, Adaptive provides clear, prioritized insights that keep security teams and company leadership updated on where risk is highest, and what actions can be taken to mitigate risk. As attackers change tactics, so does Adaptive—helping organizations reduce exposure and stay ahead of AI-powered social engineering.

The Path Forward

AI is fundamentally changing how cyberattacks are executed, and social engineering is among the primary battlefields. 

That’s exactly why we started Adaptive. This Series B gives us the ability to listen to customers and build faster. We’re grateful to the teams who trust us every day, and we’re focused on one thing going forward: helping organizations protect their people as AI reshapes the security landscape.