Azonic raises pre-seed round backed by Blackbird, Antler and former CIA and FBI leaders. Crimson Education founder Jamie Beaton, Pushpay co-founder Eliot Crowther and Emerge founder Jovan Pavlicevic join the pre-seed round. Today Azonic, Inc. is announcing Azonic's pre-seed round, backed by Blackbird and Antler alongside Jamie Beaton, founder and CEO of Crimson Education; Eliot Crowther, co-founder of Pushpay; and Jovan Pavlicevic, founder of Emerge. Azonic is a unified intelligence platform for law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigating online crime: one system for the reports, case files and intelligence that today sit in separate places, with a virtual analyst working alongside every investigator. Investigators from New Zealand, Australia and the US are already working with the platform today. Azonic, Inc. come to this from inside the fight. Co-founder and CEO Caden Scott founded the International Online Crime Coordination Center (IOC3), the non-profit that connects law enforcement agencies and the world's largest online platforms against online crime. Co-founder and CTO Thomas Holdom has spent years building AI systems for large, regulated organisations. Azonic, Inc. is also introducing its advisory board: Michael Hurley, formerly of the CIA and Palantir, where he was a senior adviser to CEO Alex Karp, and Brad Brekke, founding director of the FBI's Office of the Private Sector. "Online crime is scaling faster than the systems built to investigate it, and Azonic is tackling that gap with technology designed specifically for the realities of investigative work. Caden brings rare firsthand exposure to the problem through his work building IOC3, while Thomas brings deep experience building AI systems for complex organisations. Together, they're a potent combination of industry expertise and technical capability needed to take on a problem of this scale, and we're excited to back them" said James Palmer, Blackbird. Azonic was started because the fastest-growing criminal networks in the world have no headquarters to raid and no hierarchy to dismantle. They run on the platforms millions of Azonic, Inc. use every day, organising child sexual exploitation, sextortion, fraud and violent extremism across dozens of countries at once. When one account falls, three more appear, and reports of these crimes reaching agencies have multiplied year after year. Behind each one is a person, too often a child. In front of each one is an investigator working to reach them in time. Justice is slower by design. It demands care, rigour and proof that holds up in court. Offending is now automated, distributed and effectively industrial, while the work of proving it remains handmade. The mathematics of the fight have changed, and the people protecting children and communities deserve a way of working built for the new mathematics. The mission is simple to state and hard to do: help them move at the speed and scale of the crime they face. "In my former role with the FBI I observed first hand the speed and scale of threats emerging from the cyber world. I also saw the limitations of traditional methods to identify and track those threats. When I was introduced to Azonic and saw what Caden and Thomas had developed, I was impressed by their innovative platform and their personal commitment to assisting law enforcement. Azonic provides a new powerful tool for the intelligence community to stay ahead of the threats." said Brad Brekke, founding Director of the FBI's Office of the Private Sector. The virtual analyst amplifies every investigator standing between offenders and their victims: it runs down leads, connects a case to the ones that came before it, and drafts the outputs that move cases forward, so no report waits unseen. It is built for the teams doing the hardest work there is: child protection units, counter-extremism teams, and the investigators tracking offending that crosses every border it meets. "Azonic's unified intelligence platform will be an essential and invaluable tool to agencies all over the world that investigate online crimes. As such it has tremendous potential for business growth in law enforcement and national security agencies. The United States alone has 19,000 law enforcement agencies. Canada, the UK, and European countries will constitute a large market for Azonic's unique capabilities." said Michael Hurley, former CIA & Palantir. This is not off-the-shelf AI pointed at policing. On their own, today's AI models do not meet the bar these agencies hold their own people to. Azonic is engineered from the ground up to meet it: a complete intelligence system built for investigative work, of which AI is only one part. Criminal networks have adopted AI with no rules at all. Leveling that field, inside the rules of evidence, is at the core of Azonic. "We backed Azonic because Caden and Thomas have an earned insight to make a significant difference to the intelligence world. Caden has spent years inside the investigative world these agencies operate in, and Thomas has the AI engineering horsepower to ship the agentic tooling their customers desperately need." - James McClure, Antler. Azonic, Inc. is building Azonic with investigators, not just for them: what they tell Azonic, Inc. shapes what Azonic, Inc. ship each week. "I first met Caden as an inquisitive student in Business Navigators. I was blown away when he described his 'side hustle' fighting cyber crime and quickly realised his profound and burning passion for the space. The unicorn creation journey requires relentless obsession and Caden has that. We are delighted to support him," said Jamie Beaton, Crimson Education. This round funds the next stage of the platform and its work with the agencies on the front line of online crime. Crime scales without limits. Investigators do not. Azonic solves that. Azonic is a unified intelligence platform for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand. Agencies can request access at azonic.ai. Media enquiries: [email protected].

31 ex-lawmakers, staffers joined military firms in past 10 years. One former official is now working as a defense lobbyist even as he serves on a major Navy commission, according to a new report Aug 24, 2026 In the last decade, 31 former members of Congress and top staff have left Capitol Hill and joined the military-industrial complex as lobbyists or contractors, according to a new report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The 21 lawmakers named in the report served on either the House or Senate Armed Services Committee, the legislative bodies that set the Pentagon's annual policies through the annual National Defense Authorization Act. In addition, the report names 10 former senior committee staffers who transitioned to working as weapons industry government liaisons or lobbyists. These 31 former officials represent a snapshot of the military-industrial complex's "revolving door," through which ex-policymakers transition from setting the Pentagon's agenda in Congress to cashing in on those same policies in the private sector. "That report we published is the most direct explanation we've ever seen of why the defense budget always goes up," said John Mecklin, the author of the report and former editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The report highlighted a variety of potential ethics conflicts, focusing in particular on the growing path between Congress and Silicon Valley defense tech startups. Chris Vieson, the former staff director of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), was appointed earlier this year to the National Commission on the Future of the Navy, established to advise Congress on everything "from shipbuilding and acquisition to maintenance and repair, workforce, training, and modernization." Vieson is also an active registered lobbyist for two defense startups: Saronic Inc., a manufacturer of unmanned maritime vehicles; and watercraft builder Whiskey Project Group. Previously, Vieson worked as a lobbyist for Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm gaining influence in the Pentagon and pushing AI integration. According to its executive director, the National Commission on the Future of the Navy aims to modernize the Navy to prepare for conflict with China and Iran. As part of this goal, the Commission will "test emerging ideas such as a hybrid fleet and expanded use of unmanned systems." Vieson's lobbying client, Saronic Inc., is one manufacturer of such unmanned systems. While the revolving-door phenomenon is not new, the report captures the increasing influence of a new generation of Silicon Valley military firms. Former HASC member Mike Gallagher and staffer Jeff Miller have taken up jobs as an executive and a lobbyist, respectively, for Palantir. Former Republican staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Christian D. Brose is now the Chief Strategy Officer for Anduril, an autonomous weapons startup valued at $61 billion in its latest round of fundraising. Subscribe now to its weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy. According to Mecklin, Congress is eager to let Silicon Valley officials into their bureaucracy. "It takes the Pentagon many, many years to acquire a new defense system like a fighter plane. With a high-tech system, you just can't wait that long," he said. "So they found a way around the complicated acquisition processes of the Defense Department." Likewise, Silicon Valley weapons startups that wish to challenge prime contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin are desperate to hire former politicians. "If you're a company that wants to get into defense contracting, it's highly beneficial to hire people that understand the process of federal appropriations in the defense sector," Mecklin explained. The Bulletin's revolving-door report also details a who's-who of top congressional stock traders. Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), who has served on HASC since 2015, has been trading GE Aerospace stock via his spouse since 2023. Scott's trades this year violated the STOCK Act, a bill passed in 2012 to curb insider trading. That makes Scott one of seven Armed Services Committee members to violate the STOCK Act this year, generally for failing to disclose trades within 45 days, as the law mandates. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) is another HASC member who has benefited from military contractor stocks. In December 2025, she disclosed her husband's $100,000-$250,000 purchase of stock in Elon Musk's xAI, which merged with SpaceX soon after in February. McClain's husband's xAI shares were converted into SpaceX shares months before the company's historic IPO in June. McClain previously violated the STOCK Act for her delayed disclosure of a trade worth up to $450,000 in Palantir stock. The report also makes note of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) trading stock for prime defense contractor Lockheed Martin and aerospace manufacturer Honeywell. Tuberville, one of the most active stock traders in Congress, has served on SASC since 2021. When President Donald Trump faced criticism this spring for his own portfolio of weapons stocks, Tuberville told a reporter for MeidasTouch, "I do the same thing." Mecklin believes that laws like the STOCK Act are insufficient to curb members of Congress cashing in on defense spending. "The way you really stem this kind of behavior is to have inspectors general and law enforcement agencies that are on the lookout for them. Occasionally, take up one of these egregious cases and just prosecute it," said Mecklin. "Unless you have a system that actually scares these people so they cut it out, it's going to continue." Julian Cooper is a Chicago-based journalist, an editorial intern for The Progressive, and a research intern for the Quincy Institute's Democratizing Foreign Policy program. The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates. Top image credit: Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) walks through the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, February 6, 2024. (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA) via REUTERS Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) walks through the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, February 6, 2024. (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA) via REUTERS From Your Site Articles