ActiveFence, an Israeli startup specializing in detecting malicious content such as hate speech, targeted disinformation campaigns, fraud, and other harmful activities online and offline, has raised USD 100 million to fund its efforts.
Founded in 2018, ActiveFence said the investment will help the company continue developing its tools and expanding its customer base, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday. The company is based in New York and Tel Aviv and says its clients include government agencies, social media companies, audio and video streaming sites, file-sharing companies, video game companies, and marketplaces.
“By scanning in hidden sources of chatter and across the web, we safeguard against bad actors, the content they share, and the networks they operate,” the company says on its site.
The USD 100 million funding round actually covers ActiveFence’s most recent Series B led by CRV and Highland Europe, as well as a previously unannounced Series A round led by Israeli VC firm Grove Ventures and American venture and growth equity investment company Norwest Venture Partners. Vintage Investment Partners, Resolute Ventures, and other unnamed backers also participated, TechCrunch reported.
Noam Schwartz, ActiveFence’s co-founder and CEO, told the publication in an interview that the company takes “a fundamentally different approach to trust, safety, and content moderation.”
“We are proactively searching the darkest corners of the web and looking for bad actors in order to understand the sources of malicious content. Our customers then know what’s coming. They don’t need to wait for the damage, or for internal research teams to identify the next scam or disinformation campaign. We work with some of the most important companies in the world, but even tiny, super niche platforms have risks,” said Schwartz.
“We are very honored to have partnered with ActiveFence from the very early days of the company and to be part of this important journey to make the internet a safer place and see their unprecedented success with the world’s leading internet platforms,” said Lotan Levkowitz, general partner at Grove Ventures, in a statement cited by TechCrunch.
Online malicious activity such as targeted campaigns, abuse, disinformation, and hate speech has become a powerful, notorious challenge in recent years. Huge social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to address the problem and stem its proliferation on their systems by developing and introducing content moderation systems—with mixed results. Meanwhile, the threat actors are continually evolving.
Read this: Cybersecurity provider XDR Sec gains new financing from Sequoia Capital China