Adaptive Security, the preeminent provider of AI-powered social engineering prevention solutions, today announced the successful close of an $81 million Series B funding round. This substantial investment, which follows two previous raises this year, brings the firm’s total capital raised to $146.5 million.
The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included strategic participation from major players at the intersection of AI and finance, notably NVentures (NVIDIA‘s venture capital arm), OpenAI Startup Fund, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Abstract Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Citi Ventures.
The Accelerating Risk of AI Impersonation
The rapid and significant fundraising—which included a previous $43 million Series A and a $12 million follow-on this year—reflects widespread and urgent concern over the accelerating threat of AI-powered cyberattacks. Founded by serial entrepreneurs Brian Long (CEO) and Andrew Jones (Co-founder), who previously scaled Attentive to $500 million in annual revenue, Adaptive Security was created because traditional security training is fundamentally unprepared for cutting-edge generative AI deception.
“Over the past year, we have watched AI impersonations evolve from experimental to everyday,” said Brian Long, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Security. “A few seconds of audio or a short video clip is now enough for anyone to generate a convincing clone. That shift forces organizations to prepare for scenarios where even familiar voices, faces, or messages can no longer be taken at face value.”
Social engineering, which accounts for over 95% of successful cyber breaches, has been weaponized by Generative AI. Deepfake incidents surged 17-fold from 2023 to 2024, and Adaptive Security reported that more than half of its recent customer discussions included reports of deepfake activity. The platform uses AI to simulate these hyper-realistic impersonation scenarios across voice calls, text messages, video, and email, identifying organizational vulnerabilities and providing targeted, individualized training.
Strategic Backing from AI and Financial Giants
The investor lineup underscores the severity of the threat, drawing funds from the leaders in both technology (NVIDIA, OpenAI Startup Fund) and finance (Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures). The continued participation of the OpenAI Startup Fund—which considers Adaptive Security its first and only cybersecurity investment—validates the firm’s approach to securing AI systems and the people who interact with them.
“The surge in AI-enabled threat vectors has elevated human-layer security to a board-level priority, and Adaptive Security is emerging as the platform organizations rely on to stay ahead of these threats,” said Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. He added that the firm has “deep conviction” in the founders’ ability to build and scale category-defining products, having previously backed them on TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter) and Attentive.
With over 500 enterprise customers, including PayPal, Xerox, Bose, Figma, Ramp, and the National Hockey League, and an NPS score of 94, Adaptive Security is poised to lead the next generation of cyber defense.
📰 Editorial View: The AI-Native Defense Imperative
The remarkable velocity of Adaptive Security’s fundraising journey—three rounds in less than a year—is not merely a reflection of founder pedigree but an urgent indicator of the market’s recognition that the threat landscape has fundamentally changed. The era of generic, annual security awareness training is over. When deepfakes can be generated from seconds of publicly available data, the very concept of trust within digital communications becomes the largest and most exploitable vulnerability.
[Adaptive Security](https://adaptivesecurity.com/]‘s core innovation is its inversion of the defense strategy: it fights AI with AI. By deploying sophisticated, multi-channel simulations of deepfake phishing—across voice, video, and text—the platform actively pressure-tests the weakest link: the human layer. This approach moves security from a reactive, perimeter-focused discipline to a proactive, human-centric one. Furthermore, the company’s real-time risk assessment and AI-driven executive risk scoring allow security teams to prioritize threats based on actual employee exposure rather than abstract metrics.
The investment from tech giants NVIDIA and OpenAI Startup Fund is a powerful signal that the creators of the technology recognize the immediate need for robust countermeasures. This strategic alliance positions Adaptive Security as a critical infrastructure layer in the AI-native economy, ensuring that as generative models continue to advance, the defenses evolve at the same blistering pace. In a world where every phone call or email could be a convincing, fabricated persona, Adaptive Security is providing the essential tools to protect human trust and, ultimately, enterprise capital.
If you need further assistance or have any corrections, please reach out to editor@thetimesmag.com.
