InfoHawk raises $2.25M to fight AI-powered scams with AI
Founded by former Meta and Google trust-and-safety leaders, the Austin startup wants to build independent infrastructure for spotting online deception.
AUSTIN — InfoHawk, a startup building an AI platform to detect and neutralize online deception at internet scale, has raised $2.25 million in pre-seed funding led by Moonshots Capital. The round drew angels with deep platform experience, including former Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley and former Meta ads chief Rob Goldman.
The company was founded by Rob Leathern, Ben Poiesz and Jamie McCrindle, a team that previously built trust-and-safety and privacy systems inside Google and Meta. Their pitch is that generative AI has made scams cheaper and more convincing, and that the web needs an independent, data-driven layer to judge suspicious links, messages and accounts rather than leaving that job to the platforms that host them.
Why it matters
As AI lowers the cost of fraud, defense is becoming its own category of AI startup, and InfoHawk is trying to position itself as neutral infrastructure other companies can plug into. The pedigree of its founders and backers gives it credibility in a crowded field, and it adds to Austin's growing roster of security-focused startups working on the darker side of the AI boom.
With AI now turbocharging scams, InfoHawk is building exactly the kind of independent, data-driven infrastructure the internet needs.— Moonshots Capital, lead investor
Reported by Next in Austin. Based on reporting from PR Newswire.
