ActiveFence
Rachael Levy, director of geopolitical risk: “ActiveFence is a leading tool stack for trust and safety teams. Anyone can throw AI at a problem. It’s not going to solve it. Hordes of content moderators are also not going to be a robust solution. Trust and safety teams need to be agile, efficient, and accurate—what ActiveFence enables them to be—by uniquely combining technology and human expertise to analyze campaigns at scale. Our analysts are subject-matter experts in particular fields, geographies, and languages.”
Overview: An AI-based software platform used by trust and safety teams worldwide to reduce harm and keep users safe on online platforms. The platform focuses on a range of online harm, unwanted content, and malicious behavior, including disinformation, fraud, hate speech, terror, nudity, and that which could endanger the safety of children. Its advanced AI and team of experts continuously collect, analyze, and contextualize data.
Funding: Raised $100 million to date. Backed by Silicon Valley investors CRV and Norwest.
Staff Size: 280
Launch Date: 2018
Future Plans: ActiveFence “proactively search[es] the darkest corners of the web for bad actors to understand the sources of malicious content,” Noam Schwartz, co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCrunch in 2021.51
AverPoint
Shouvik Banerjee, founder and chief executive officer: “We focus on the demand for higher quality information and empower individuals with healthy news habits and critical thinking skills. This is just as important as the other approaches, which focus more on information supply: machine learning for content moderation, fact-checking, regulations, and standards.”
Overview: An app and browser extension that helps individuals and communities build healthy news habits and media literacy skills. AverPoint measures and analyzes a user’s news consumption, and then nudges them to increase their source, topic, and geographic diversity. AverPoint’s credibility layer lets readers interact with articles to ask questions, request reviews, and evaluate evidence.
Funding: Undisclosed. No prior public announcements.
Staff Size: 5
Launch Date: 2016
Future Plans: Charge US consumers for access to paywalled content from news partners. Currently, readers measure their reading automatically through the browser extension and manually through the mobile app. Over time, AverPoint plans to integrate its services directly into publisher websites and apps so it works more ubiquitously in the background.
Blackbird.AI
Naushad UzZaman, co-founder and chief technology officer: “Opening up data with de-identification (removal of users’ personal information) to the research community and externally [expands awareness of] the spread of mis/disinformation on big platforms. For example, because Twitter allows the collection of data using their Application Programming Interface, people know how much disinformation is being spread on Twitter. However, similar research cannot be conducted on any of Meta’s platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, while a large amount of harmful content spreads on these platforms.”
Overview: A Software-as-a-Service platform using AI to spot, predict, and examine emergent threats and provide risk intelligence by identifying mis/disinformation. The platform uses a combination of five core signals related to content, context analysis, and pattern recognition to surface threats: manipulation, deception, narratives, networks, and coalition.
Funding: A first round of funding in 2014 from a Silicon Valley incubator. Blackbird.AI raised $10 million in Series A52 in 2021, led by Dorilton Ventures. Other investors include Generation Ventures, Trousdale Ventures, StartFast Ventures, NetX, and Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism advisor for the National Security Council.53
Staff Size: 30
Launch Date: 2017
Future Plans: The next iteration of the platform will include image and video analysis. The startup aims to analyze any data on the web regardless of the sector and “to stop harm, before it gains traction so that the online space is used to elevate society,’’ said Naushad UzZaman.
Constella Intelligence
Jonathan Nelson, digital intelligence specialist: “We pivoted to the analysis of the dark web: How can we connect the dots between what is happening on the surface and in the dark web such as in illegal markets?”
Overview: A digital threat protection software that taps proprietary data, technology, and human expertise. Services include executive cyber protection, brand protection, threat intelligence, fraud protection, and geopolitical intelligence monitoring. Its clients include companies on the FTSE 100 and Fortune 500, the UK government, EU institutions, and global tier one banks. Software licenses allow clients to use the tools to understand key trends.
Funding: Received more than $60 million funding: €12.5 million ($13.8 million) in Series A in 2016, $18 million in Series B in 2018, and $30 million in Series C in 2020. Major investors include Adara Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures, C5 Capital and ForgePoint Capital.54 Constella does not disclose whether it is profitable. It earns revenue from third-party licensing.
Staff Size: 166
Launch Date: 2020
Future Plans: In September 2021, Constella launched its Dome Platform, which provides Executive Cyber Protection.55 This automated platform can be integrated with companies’ existing IT and security infrastructure, expanding protection to any number of employees. According to chief executive officer Kailash Ambwani, “This platform [allows] companies the opportunity to monitor diverse digital sources. So, limiting its digital threat monitoring services to a few executives or employees will no longer be necessary.”
Cyabra
Dan Brahmy, co-founder and chief executive officer: “I don’t think Big Tech will develop solutions in-house because they lack the will and financial incentive. And existing regulations are not forcing them to do anything substantial. [Big Tech] will not acquire companies like ours unless they have to. And even if they have to, they might acquire companies to silence them.”
Overview: A Software-as-a-Service platform that conducts narrative and pattern analysis to measure mis/disinformation. Cyabra’s customers are primarily in the financial services industry with others in the consumer brands, media, and public sectors. “Our most interesting market is the private sector: large companies with brand or reputational issues. This is why financial services, and advertising and data analytics agencies like TBWA56 are interesting to us,” said Dan Brahmy.
Funding: Received $1.2 million in the pre-seed round in 2018 and $5.6 million in Series A in 2021, the latter led by OurCrowd.57 Other investors include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Harpoon Ventures, Alabaster, Accomplice, Red Shepherd Ventures, Summus Z, TAU Ventures and Capital Y management. Among angel investors are former global co-general manager of Samsung Pay Will Graylin and former chief product officer of Tinder, Brian Norgard. Cyabra expects additional funding in 2022 of low-mid eight figures.
Staff Size: 25
Launch Date: 2018
Future Plans: To expand online reach beyond written online content into speech, including that in podcasts, online videos and streaming.
Graphika
John Kelly, chief executive officer, and Guyte McCord, chief operations officer: “No magical algorithmic toolset will solve online mis/disinformation. We hope to deliver more human-driven solutions around it.”
Overview: Graphika’s platform identifies and tracks the formation of communities online, and maps how influence, narratives and information flow within large-scale networks. This allows it to map structural relationships among social media actors, and segment these complex networks based on patterns it observes in relationships.
Funding: Received over $8 million in total: $3.4 million in 2014 and $4.9 million in Series A in 2017.58 Major investors include Lavrock Ventures, Social Media Enterprises and First In.
Staff: 50
Launch Date: 2013
Future plans: Graphika now sees its primary market as B2B. This year, it will deliver an important technology product which will allow businesses to have a subscription service for important topics being tracked, mapped, and analyzed by Graphika. This actionable intelligence will be important for companies impacted by topics and communities that matter to them the most.
The Factual
Arjun Moorthy, co-founder and chief executive officer: “Think of AI as a complement to human thinking, not a replacement. While computers can tell if a specific fact is true or false, tying facts together and understanding the news requires tremendous context and history, which is where humans excel. Hence AI can help identify all the facts and make it easier for humans to reach their own conclusions.”
Overview: An AI-enabled news platform that finds unbiased news, pushing content consumers to expand their trustworthy news sources. The Factual analyzes the credibility of more than 10,000 news articles daily based on the quality of sources, tone of writing, author expertise, and historical site scores, surfacing the stories based on these factors across the political spectrum in a daily newsletter, app, and website.
Funding: Received $1 million from angel and venture capital investments to maintain operations. Investors include HubSpot co-founders Brian Hallian and Dharmesh Shah, former chief executive officer of Lola, board member of Repsly Mike Volpe, and former president of Pinterest Tim Kendall. The Factual also received investments from Defy Ventures and Matrix Partners. The Factual is planning a seed round investment in 2022.
Staff Size: 10
Launch Date: 2019
Future Plans: To validate broad demand in the market for quality journalism with 100,000 subscribers or more.
Kinzen
Mark Little, founder and chief executive officer: “Two things [around information ecology] have emerged that have not been properly teased out. First, insufficient defense of the protection of free speech through content moderation. The only way to protect free speech is to stop its weaponization. Where are the articulate voices defending good moderation as crucial to the survival of free speech and democratic values? Secondly, the issue of provenance. Quality information is not moving fast enough. How do we get it to move faster? How can we accelerate good information [amid] an information gap?”
Overview: A proprietary content understanding engine that helps content moderators and policymakers stay ahead of information threats such as misinformation and hate speech through a blend of human judgment and artificial intelligence. Kinzen’s technology detects and scores information risk in text, audio, and video content.
Funding: Raised a total €3.45 million including €1.65 million in a seed round in 2020 led by Danish start-up accelerator FST Growth.
Staff Size: 40
Launch Date: 2017
Future Plans: Scaling its analysis and data services to all major global languages (to 20 from 12 in 2022), and further investment in machine learning models optimized for the detection of information risks. In the long term, Kinzen hopes to support user-controlled moderation services in partnership with global technology companies.
Marvelous AI
Danielle Deibler, co-founder and chief executive officer: “When it comes to building a model, it’s human powered. Humans create the labels, and flesh out [the] nuances of narratives. You need enough examples [of these narratives] to build enough models. But you can do a lot with a very small amount of data. The narrative pipeline requires human care and feeding. The model takes into account emotional characteristics like anger, sadness, and joy.”
Overview: An early-stage startup founded by tech industry veterans that is building an augmented analytics platform to generate actionable insights about online narratives. Marvelous AI combines human intervention with natural language processing, computational linguistics, and machine learning to detect mis/disinformation and harmful narratives.
Funding: Mostly funded by friends, family, and venture funds. The investment covers roughly one year of its operations.
Staff Size: Founders Danielle Deibler (chief executive officer), Christopher Walker (chief operations officer), and Olya Gurevich (chief scientist).
Launch Date: 2018
Future Plans: To provide power and tools to continue uncovering mis/disinformation. It does not seek to be acquired. It seeks a way to tamp down mis/disinformation or, at a minimum, halt its flow.
Memetica
Ben Decker, founder and chief executive officer: “From an investor point-of-view, [the market] is oversaturated; from a business growth perspective, the bubble will burst somewhere, somehow, and probably consolidate to a few key players.”
“Our main differentiator from those who provide threat monitoring services is our overemphasis on the human and our white-glove customer service,” explained Decker. “We’re like the luddites of the industry. We hardly use AI or machine learning. We ingest raw data; real human analysts evaluate and query it for relevant items. [This] allows us to catch what more robust AI systems aren’t catching due to lack of context.”
Overview: A digital investigations consultancy that provides intelligence and risk advisory services to media companies, civil society organizations, whistleblowers, and other public figures facing threats from coordinated harassment, disinformation campaigns, and violent extremism. Memetica does this through a combination of open-source and human intelligence gathering practices to collect raw data from fringe communities on sites like Telegram, 4chan, and others, as well as mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Analysts uncover, investigate, and flag threats of harassment campaigns and real-world violence. Working with several R&D partners, Memetica taps its team of experts and advanced tools to improve digital protection for public safety.
Funding: Launched in 2019 with a small research grant from Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by Google that supports technology solutions to combat disinformation, censorship, toxicity, and violent extremism online.59 Between 2019 and 2021, Memetica increased its revenue by 250 percent, growing from $160,000 in its first year to $570,000 in 2021.
Staff Size: 5
Launch Date: 2019
Future Plans: Memetica will continue developing tools and products to provide threat intelligence and risk mitigation services to media companies, civil society organizations, and other public-facing entities. Focus industries for expansion include healthcare, entertainment, and sports. The company also plans to fortify existing and future R&D partnerships by working with major research labs to improve industry standards for curbing imminent harms and reducing long-term structural vulnerabilities to election integrity and public safety.
NewsGuard
Matt Skibinski, general manager: “Every platform has said that they were one algorithm away from solving the problem. [For us], it wasn’t just an algorithm problem. It was a media literacy problem and a journalism problem.”
Overview: A browser extension tool that rates websites to equip users with context on the sources they encounter. NewsGuard has rated 7,500 domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada, and it has a subscriber base of 100,000 users, with wider distribution through partnerships with Microsoft and the American Federation of Teachers. The tool’s overall rating is based on nine criteria that determine journalistic credibility. These include false claims published regularly by the source, funders, and any use of deceptive headlines. NewsGuard contacts publishers so they can rectify errors.
Funding: Raised $6 million in a seed round in 2018 led by Publicis Groupe, an ad agency holding company.60 Other investors include Cox Investment Holdings, the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation, Blue Haven Initiative, and journalists Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz.
Staff Size: 38
Launch Date: 2018
Future Plans: In February 2022, NewsGuard partnered with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.61 Its data will support the JRC’s research in source reliability, narrative detection, and the spread of these narratives in different languages.
Nobias
Tania Ahuja, founder and chief executive officer: “Trust is at an all-time low and social media has played a major role in this decline. Our goal is to give young investors a tool that provides the missing intelligence they need to start to trust their own critical thinking. We don’t combat fake news and misinformation directly, but indirectly by providing our users with signals of credibility and bias in articles and among authors they see online, even before clicking or opening a website. We hope these signals will force our users to slow down and think critically about the information they read and share online.”
Overview: A B2C data-driven software that uses NLP to identify bias in online political, financial, and health articles with the goal of promoting responsible and inclusive technology to protect consumers from misleading or deceptive online content. Nobias does not disclose its customer base.
Funding: Its source of revenue is the finance application in which users see stock insights like ratings from Nobias-rated analysts and read articles from popular finance authors rated with Nobias insights including sentiment of the article and the credibility of the authors based on the accuracy of their recommendations over the past three years.62
Staff Size: 12
Launch Date: 2017
Future Plans: Will run the business based on a freemium model, with basic features remaining ad-free.
nwzer
Karim Maassen, founder: “In The Netherlands during Easter, shoppers at grocery stores can guess how many candies are in a bowl. The closest guess wins. But research shows that all the guesses averaged out are the right answer. Bring that to ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and apply it to fact checking content for readers with a common goal. Readers will quickly validate any informal commenting or any piece of opinionated text [and the nwzer algorithm will learn from that activity].”
Overview: A user-generated news agency whose algorithm, which is built on NLP, makes possible self-moderating, -correcting, and -evaluating by readers. Working in the background on the behalf of publishers, its algorithm learns from readers’ comments and separates valuable from less valuable information to support fact checking.
Funding: Started with a €40,000 grant from the Google News Initiative in 2017, a partnership between Google and publishers in Europe to advance “the practice of quality journalism,” strengthen and evolve “publisher business models,” and cultivate a “global news community.”63 The company now operates exclusively on earned revenue and is profitable.
Staff Size: 10
Launch Date: 2016
Future Plans: To develop its algorithm into a platform for citizen journalists. It plans to use its technology—which allows users to write about, interact with, and annotate news content in real-time—to combine individual consumer interactions with digital content and, ultimately, index “what the crowd is saying” about current events.
Truepic
Mounir Ibrahim, vice president of public affairs and impact: “COVID-19 accelerated a pre-existing trend of the digitization of everything we do. Who you’re voting for, dating, what you’re buying; everything starts with a video or a picture. Trust technology will need to play a role in a lot of verticals. Furthermore, government awareness…of trust technologies is growing [to monitor] digital content online. For more than consumer protection; for national security. Not trusting what you see and hear online is not only a fraud issue, but also a national security issue.”
Overview: A photo and video authentication technology that allows businesses, non-profit organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and citizen journalists around the world to verify their photos and videos.
Funding: Raised more than $1 million in seed rounds between 2016 and 2017, $8 million in Series A in 2018, and $26 million in Series B in 2021, led by Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Adobe, Sony Innovation Fund, Hearst Ventures, and individuals from Stone Point Capital.64
Staff Size: 53
Launch Date: 2015
Future Plans: In addition to its TruepicVision B2B vision platform,65 Truepic is building a consumer-facing Software Development Kit, called TruepicLens.66 Available for iOS and Android users, consumers will be able to integrate Truepic’s highly specialized camera technology into existing applications to verify the authenticity of photos.
Vett News
Paul Glader, founder and chief executive officer: “Many citizens don’t want help solving misinformation, and to pay for such technology to help them do so in a B2C product. So, we pivoted to a B2B product designed to help newsrooms strengthen their relationship and communication with the public. This kind of NewsTech product offers hope for a better future with quality information.”
Overview: A workflow automation system that enables readers to click a button on any article and fill out a form to report typos, factual errors, issues of bias, or context. The reader gets an immediate “thank you” note and the editor gets an automated notification to handle the reader request in a dashboard that allows the editor to manage credibility issues quickly and personally.67
Funding: Received $75,000 in 2019 from the Knight Foundation, and $10,000 from NYC Media Lab.
Staff Size: 5
Launch Date: 2017
Future Plans: Hopes to expand its paying customer base and raise angel and corporate funding. Current pricing is $50 per month for independent press outlets, $500 per month for community papers, and $1000 per month for national publications.
Zignal Labs
Jennifer Granston, chief customer officer and head of insights: “We don’t label content as ‘true or false,’ or ‘harmful or not harmful.’ Zignal’s technology enables users to detect and mitigate narrative-borne threats and capitalize on narrative-borne opportunities—as they emerge in real time. For example, NLP and machine learning allow us to identify which accounts on Twitter behave as if they are using a high level of automation and sharing content in inauthentic ways.”
“At Zignal, we are constantly reviewing media and social platforms to see the conversations that are happening and identify emerging narratives. We look at online sources like Twitter, Reddit, forums, and Sina Weibo, among others, as well as traditional media like print and broadcast. We see a lot on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit, but the tactics and methods really vary based on how you look at the data. The data doesn’t follow a pattern, so it’s key to be able to look at the entire landscape and see narratives and channels as they pop up.”
Overview: A Software-as-a-Service-based tool whose Narrative Intelligence Cloud analyzes billions of digital stories in real time to help customers discover and manage the narratives that can help or harm them. Originally conceived as a tool for political campaigns accustomed to media “war rooms”, it is now used by the world’s largest companies and public sector organizations to identify emerging risks and opportunities through Zignal’s NLP and machine-learning algorithms, while providing insight into how to contend with the narratives that matter. Zignal serves customers around the world, including Expedia, Synchrony, Prudential, and The Public Good Projects.
Funding: Raised total of $74.9 million in funding over six rounds since 2012, with first-round funding in January 2012 from Mena Venture Investments. Series A funding of $4.2 million followed in January 2013. Among other investors are North Atlantic Capital and Blum Capital Partners, as well as individual investors Andy Ballard, chief executive officer of Wiser Solutions,68 Jim Hornthal, chairman of M34 Capital,69 and Mitchell Cohen of Trilogy Search Partners.70 Zignal Labs’ last round of debt financing totaled $20 million from Alignment Credit in January 2019.71
Staff Size: 100+
Launch Date: 2011
Future Plans: In June 2021, Zignal Labs introduced Emerging Narratives, an AI tool to help organizations understand narrative risk online.72 “The important thing is putting technology into the hands of people who can do something positive with it,” said Jennifer Granston. “And using data not just to look in the rearview mirror, but to inform strategy.”
[51] Ingrid Lunden, “ActiveFence comes out of the shadows with $100M in funding and tech that detects online harm, now valued at $500M+,” TechCrunch+, July 27, 2021.
[52] Series A, Series B, and Series C are external funding rounds that may follow seed funding.
[53] Sai Venkatesh, “Blackbird.AI raises $10M in Series A from Dorilton Ventures and others,” SaaS Industry, September 22, 2021.
[54] Constella Intelligence, Dealroom.co, accessed on May 10, 2022.
[55] See Constella Dome on Constella Intelligence’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[56] See TBWA’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[57] Kate Park, “Cyabra gets $5.6M Series A to launch news disinformation detection analysis tools,” TechCrunch+, October 26, 2021.
[58] “Graphika Valuation & Funding,” Pitchbook, accessed on May 10, 2022.
[59] See Jigsaw’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[60] “Finsmes, NewsGuard Raises $6M in Funding,” March 6, 2018.
[61] NewsGuard, “NewsGuard partners with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission,” February 10, 2022.
[62] See Nobias’ website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[63] See Google News Initiative’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[64] Truepic, “Truepic Raises $26 Million Series B Financing Led by M12—Microsoft’s Venture Fund to Scale World’s Most Secure Camera Technology,” Cision PR Newswire, September 14, 2021.
[65] See TruepicVision on Truepic’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[66] See TruepicLens on Truepic’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[67] Homepage, Vett News, accessed on May 10, 2022.
[68] See Wiser Solutions’ website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[69] See M34 Capital’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[70] See Trilogy Search Partners’ website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[71] See Alignment Credit’s website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
[72] See Zignal Emerging Narratives on Zignal Labs’ website. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
