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Start-up of the week: Outtake tackles next-gen identity fraud. February 12, 2026 Outtake's Annual Recurring Revenue has increased six times year-over-year, while its customer base grew more than ten times International Finance Business Desk Global verification and fraud prevention firm Sumsub recently published its report on the global rate of identity fraud. While the report witnessed a decrease in crime numbers in 2025, the immediate cheer may prove to be short-term, as things are undergoing a "sophistication shift," with sloppy, low-effort incidents of identity fraud noticed in 2024 now replaced by fewer but sharper, multi-step, and coordinated operations. In this backdrop, Brooklyn-based Outtake, whose agentic cybersecurity platform helps enterprises detect, investigate, and take down identity fraud, has raised a USD 40 million Series B round of funding. While the amount may not sound huge compared to the capital raised by Outtake's industry peers, the funding round hit the headlines due to the list of participating angel investors, which included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, Pershing Square Holdings CEO Bill Ackman, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens, former OpenAI VP Bob McGrew, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and former AT&T CEO John Donovan. Knowing The Player In Detail Outtake, established in 2023 by former Palantir engineer Alex Dhillon, has come up with a fix when it comes to automating what has largely been a manual problem: spotting and taking down digital identity posers, entities like impersonation accounts, malicious domains posing as companies' official websites, rogue apps, fraudulent ads, and more. Outtake has customers like OpenAI, British financial services company Pershing Square, and American mobile technology company AppLovin, along with several federal agencies. OpenAI even profiled the company in July 2025 as an example of an agentic start-up built on its reasoning models. Outtake's ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) has increased six times year-over-year, while its customer base grew more than ten times. This shows one thing: while the demand for foolproof cybersecurity solutions is expanding rapidly, the 21st century's global socio-economic order is also taking the threat of digital identity theft more seriously than ever. According to Dhillon and his team, two-thirds of identity theft-related attacks now utilise some form of AI, remarking, "the question isn't whether your organisation will be targeted, it's whether your defences can match the sophistication of AI-powered threats that are reshaping the very nature of cybercrime." So, what is Outtake dealing with? The rising menace of bots, with a 2024 study claiming that 30% of accounts across major social media platforms are likely to be fake. These bots are used to spread scams, steal identities, or manipulate public opinion. Then add the 703% increase in credential phishing attacks, thanks to the widespread availability of AI-generated phishing kits online. We also have a 202% increase in phishing emails, with generative AI tools and automation again helping hackers compose phishing emails up to 40% faster. Making 'Digital Trust' Great Again Talking about Outtake's "AI-Driven Intelligence for Open Sources," the start-up's AI agents cut through noise and contextualise risks in real time by delivering the early warning security teams need to protect people, reputation, and operations. "Manual OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) workflows can't keep pace with today's threat landscape. Security analysts spend hours chasing false positives, triaging repetitive alerts, and piecing together fragments from multiple sources," the venture stated, further pointing out issues like manual backlogs (with threat actors quickly shifting their campaign methods by the time analysts detect and manually remediate a threat), an endless streak of false alerts (with keyword-based monitoring generating endless dead ends, burying investigators in irrelevant hits and obscuring the real signals that matter), and manual correlation of findings (with cybersecurity teams seeing isolated incidents as big wins rather than uncovering the full campaign across platforms and sources). To counter these, Outtake has bet big on AI agents, which continuously discover and analyse images, videos, audio, and text across the open web, delivering contextualised intelligence without the manual overhead. They track emerging narratives (upcoming cybercrime trends) and force-protection campaigns before they escalate into reputational or physical risks. Legacy traditional tools often end up missing threats from social platforms, forums, and open sources, something that Outtake's AI agents address thoroughly, taking things further to "Location-Based Risk Intelligence" by mapping chatter tied to physical locations to anticipate risks to executives, facilities, and events. Also, "AI-Driven Intelligence for Open Sources" keeps its client businesses safe by monitoring third-party players like vendors, partners, and acquisition targets for emerging risks. After everything, Outtake distils millions of signals into clear, prioritised summaries before delivering threat digests directly to clients' inboxes or collaboration tools, customised to the latter's security priorities. Next are "Digital Risk Protection" agents that, in the start-up's language, provide "AI that tirelessly detects, prioritises, and dismantles impersonation threats across domains, social media, apps, and ads." When it comes to proactively identifying and eliminating digital impersonation threats, traditional methods are trailing severely. How? First of all, they are drowning in AI-generated noise due to the widespread availability of AI-generated phishing kits online. Attacks are getting sophisticated and fast-paced, with threat actors diversifying their mediums. Apart from missing threats hidden in images, videos, code, and visual brand abuse, legacy keyword tools end up chasing nodes while missing well-coordinated campaigns. These solutions are only capable of tackling isolated threats instead of going after the full attack ecosystem. They can't connect signals across platforms, leaving coordinated campaigns intact and growing. "Digital Risk Protection" agents have been tailored with social engineering scams in mind - criminal acts that exploit human psychology to trick individuals into divulging confidential information, transferring money, or installing malware. These attacks are known for impersonating trusted entities or businesses through phishing (emails), vishing (phone calls), or smishing (SMS). Outtake's solution goes aggressively after these elements, removing fake brand and executive impersonations across all platforms while continuously mapping threat infrastructure across digital mediums, revealing the hidden links that single-point tools overlook. Be it fraudulent phishing, malware domains, fake mobile apps, or deceptive marketplace listings, "Digital Risk Protection" agents have been tasked with one job: monitor, identify, and take down. Redefining Digital Verification Business Email Compromise (BEC), which targets organisations through deceptive emails, skyrocketed in 2025, with Barracuda's "Email Security Breach Report" registering a staggering 78% of surveyed organisations worldwide experiencing an email security breach throughout the year, with the lack of expertise, automation, and awareness ending up costing companies money, reputation, customers, and growth prospects. Against this backdrop, Outtake has launched a device- and identity-bound authentication tool via World ID or passkeys, as AI is known for generating both phishing and legitimate emails. "Outtake Verify" has evolved as a browser extension that cryptographically verifies a business' identity (through mathematical proof instead of probabilistic guessing) and signs the company's emails. Even if the official mail account gets hacked, Outtake still ensures that these compromised accounts can't send verified emails by denying attackers device-bound authentication. The solution not only improves internal email security for Outtake's client organisations, but it also increases trust in third-party communications by making the whole digital environment secure. "Outtake Verify" also reduces the burden on human cybersecurity professionals within a team by taking over tasks like verifying executive payment approvals, eliminating out-of-band confirmations, ensuring sensitive documents come from authenticated sources with message integrity, and extending trust beyond organisational boundaries by requiring authentication from key vendors.

Outtake makes an agentic cybersecurity platform to help enterprises detect identity fraud. Its angel investors read like a who's who of tech industry names.

Outtake raises $40M Series B led by ICONIQ to build the unified platform for digital trust in the AI era. Outtake, a digital trust platform protecting organizations from AI-driven impersonation, today announced a $40M Series B led by ICONIQ, with participation from CRV, S32, and a group of leading technology and security executives as angel investors, including Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Holdings, Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, Trae Stephens, Co-Founder of Anduril, Bob McGrew, Former VP of Research at OpenAI, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, and John Donovan, Former CEO of AT&T. The funding will accelerate Outtake's mission to become the unified platform enterprises rely on to establish and defend trust across the AI-native web. Digital identity is rapidly eroding as AI dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of cybercrime. What once required coordinated criminal groups and weeks of preparation can now be executed by individuals in hours. AI has enabled attackers to industrialize deception, driving a surge in identity-based abuse across every digital channel where organizations engage the public. In 2024 alone, organizations experienced a 703% increase in credential theft and a 250% surge in account takeovers. Attacks no longer occur in isolation; they are continuous, cross-channel campaigns, yet most security teams are still forced to respond using fragmented tools and manual workflows. The result is significant financial loss, reputational damage, and targeted abuse of customers and employees. Outtake was built to address this new reality. The company provides a single, unified protection layer across all digital identity surfaces, enabling security teams to detect, investigate, and disrupt identity-based threats as coordinated campaigns, not disconnected incidents. Outtake partners closely with enterprises to design tailored workflows that increase operational velocity, accelerate investigation and prioritization, reduce time to takedown, and surface threats hidden within images, video, and complex online ecosystems. "Security teams are being asked to defend trust everywhere their organization shows up online, while attackers move faster and operate across channels," said Alex Dhillon, Founder and CEO of Outtake. "We built Outtake because point solutions can't keep up with AI-driven deception. Enterprises are choosing a unified platform for digital trust, and this funding allows us to scale alongside customers as that shift accelerates." Dhillon spent five years on Palantir's moonshot team, developing zero-to-one engineering projects for C-suite executives before launching Outtake. The team includes alumni from Palantir, SpaceX, Notion, and repeat founders who have built and scaled category-defining companies. Outtake is witnessing rapid adoption by enterprise security teams, experiencing accelerating momentum, including 6x ARR growth YoY, over 10x growth in enterprise customers YoY, and 250%+ growth in headcount YoY, driven primarily by product, engineering, and GTM. Outtake is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and critical institutions like OpenAI, Pershing Square, Fortescue, AppLovin, and federal agencies. In 2025, the company processed 17M+ alerts, completed 4M+ investigations and achieved a median takedown time of 18-36 hours per credible threat. This growth reflects a clear shift in how security leaders are prioritizing digital identity risk and a growing recognition that point solutions are no longer sufficient in the age of AI-driven deception. "At ICONIQ, we partner with founders building enduring platforms for some of the most critical challenges enterprises face," said Murali Joshi, General Partner at ICONIQ, who is joining Outtake's board. "Digital identity and trust are being fundamentally reshaped by AI, and we believe the team is ambitious and committed to addressing this problem. We are proud to partner with them as they continue to scale." The new funding will help Outtake expand its team across engineering, product, and go-to-market teams, deepen its platform capabilities, and support growing global demand. Outtake Outtake is a digital trust platform that helps organizations detect, investigate, and disrupt identity-based threats across the AI-native web. By unifying protection across digital surfaces, Outtake enables institutions to operate with confidence in an era of industrialized deception. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260128049292/en/