AI security startup Outtake raises $40 million from celebrities including Iconiq, Satya Nadella, Bill Ackman and more

Outtake, which develops an agent-based cybersecurity platform that helps businesses detect, investigate and stop identity fraud, has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding.

That may not sound like a lot considering some AI companies raise huge sums of money, but the names involved in this funding seem to be from the tech industry.

The round was led by Iconiq’s Murali Joshi, who led the company’s investments in companies including Anthropic, Datadog, Drata, and 1Password.

Angel investors include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Holdings. Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO. Trae Stephens, co-founder of Anduril; Bob McGrew, former Vice President of OpenAI. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and former AT&T CEO John Donovan. Phew!

What’s the reason for the excitement? Founded in 2023 by former Palantir engineer Alex Dhillon, Outtake has discovered a way to automate the traditionally manual problem of discovering and removing people impersonating digital identities, including spoofed accounts, malicious domains masquerading as companies, fraudulent apps, and fraudulent ads. This problem has become even more difficult because AI has made attackers more convincing and able to attack faster.

“We kept hearing whispers on our network about an AI company finally solving digital misrepresentation at scale. To be honest, we were skeptical,” Joshi told TechCrunch. “Historically, detection and removal was (and still is to some extent) a manual, human-intensive process that could not keep up with the speed of the Internet.”

But once Iconiq saw the product and did its due diligence with customers, investors started believing in it, he said. “They have turned a ‘human problem’ into a ‘software problem.’ Watching AI eliminate digital fraud in real time is a game-changer for brand safety,” he said.

Dillon told TechCrunch that his experience at Palantir led him to land a number of high-profile angels. “When I was on the Experimental Products team, I worked directly for Shyam Sankar at Palantir,” he explained. This led him to meet many of the current and former Palantir factions, including Stevens, who had worked there in Palantir’s early days. (Mr. Stevens is also a VC for Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.) One introduction led to another, and the big names began writing the checks.

The company’s customers include OpenAI, Pershing Square, AppLovin, and federal government agencies. In July 2025, OpenAI introduced the company as an example of an agent startup built on inference models.

The company says it has experienced strong overall growth, with annual recurring revenue increasing six times year over year and its customer base growing more than ten times. Outtake says its systems scanned 20 million potential cyberattacks last year alone.