A cybersecurity startup founded by a former Palantir engineer has secured a $40 million investment backed by one of the most star-studded lists of angel investors ever assembled, signaling a major shift in the fight against AI-driven digital fraud.
Outtake, which uses autonomous AI agents to automatically detect and dismantle identity-based attacks, announced the closure of its $40 million Series B round on January 28, 2026. The round was led by venture firm Iconiq, with participation from CRV and S32.
While the funding amount is noteworthy in its own right, it is the roster of individual investors that has turned heads across Silicon Valley and the security industry. The angel list reads like a “who’s who” of tech and finance leadership:
- 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
- Former OpenAI VP Bob McGrew, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and former AT&T CEO John Donovan.
The Palantir Pedigree and the AI Arms Race
The founder, Alex Dhillon, is a key to understanding this unprecedented backing. He spent nearly five years on Palantir’s experimental “moonshot team,” working directly under CTO Shyam Sankar. This experience not only shaped his technical approach but also provided the network that made this fundraising possible.
“The reason we were able to get so many notable angels is because of the Palantir network,” Dhillon explained. “One introduction led to another which led to moguls writing checks”.
Outtake is tackling a problem that has exploded with the advent of generative AI. Cybercriminals can now use the technology to create highly convincing phishing emails, fake social media profiles, fraudulent ads, and malicious websites at an industrial scale. Traditional, manual defense methods are completely outpaced.
“What they’ve built, from a product perspective, is so fundamentally differentiated relative to everything else that’s been on the market,” said Murali Joshi, General Partner at Iconiq, who is joining Outtake’s board.
How Outtake’s “Agentic” AI Platform Works
Outtake’s solution is a unified platform that deploys autonomous AI agents to act as a continuous defense system. These agents don’t just scan for keywords; they perceive and understand threats across text, images, video, and audio, allowing them to uncover sophisticated impersonation campaigns that other tools miss.
The platform provides protection across four key threat surfaces:
| Threat Surface | Outtake’s Action |
|---|---|
| Social Media | Detects and removes fake brand and executive impersonation accounts. |
| Domains | Monitors and initiates takedowns of fraudulent phishing and malware domains. |
| Mobile Apps | Identifies and removes fake apps from official and third-party marketplaces. |
| Digital Ads | Eliminates fraudulent advertising campaigns that impersonate a brand. |
This approach transforms a historically manual, human-intensive process into an automated software solution. “They’ve turned a ‘human problem’ into a ‘software problem,’” Joshi noted. “Seeing AI take down digital frauds in real time is a game-changer”.
Explosive Traction and a Vision for Internet Trust
The market’s need for such a solution is reflected in Outtake’s staggering growth metrics. The company reports a sixfold increase in annual recurring revenue year-over-year and a more than tenfold growth in its enterprise customer base. In 2025 alone, its systems scanned over 20 million potential cyberattacks and achieved a median threat takedown time of 18-36 hours.
Its client list is equally impressive, featuring AI labs like OpenAI, financial giants like Pershing Square, tech companies like AppLovin, federal agencies, and Fortune 500 brands. OpenAI has even profiled Outtake as a prime example of an “agentic startup” built on its reasoning models.
For Dhillon, this is about more than just cybersecurity. “We’re headed towards this world of always-on security,” he said. “We built Outtake because point solutions can’t keep up with AI-driven deception… We are building a trust layer for the Internet“.
The new $40 million in capital will be used to expand Outtake’s 35-person team across engineering, product, and go-to-market functions, scaling its platform to meet surging global demand. In an internet era where AI has weaponized deception, Outtake and its all-star backers are betting that autonomous AI agents will be the essential guardians of digital identity.
