Social engineering defense startup Adaptive Security Inc. today revealed that it has raised $81 million in new funding to expand its platform and accelerate product development.

Founded in 2024, Adaptive is taking on the threat of artificial intelligence-powered social engineering with a mission to protect organizations from next-generation threats that exploit human trust rather than technical vulnerabilities.

The company offers an AI-driven simulation platform that uses advanced models to generate realistic, multichannel attack scenarios that mirror how actual AI-enabled threats behave. The simulations cover email phishing, SMS attacks and voice deepfake vectors to expose employees to the kinds of deceptive tactics that are increasingly used by adversaries.

Along with simulation and training, Adaptive’s platform continuously assesses real-time risk across an organization’s workforce by measuring how individuals respond to simulated threats. The platform monitors when employees fall for a simulated deepfake or phishing attempt, updates their risk profile and can automatically delivers targeted training to strengthen weaknesses.

Core to the company’s offering is a focus on human-centric training and behavior change. The company’s tools provide contextualized learning experiences that teach employees how to recognize AI-enhanced deception in the wild instead of just alerting the information technology department when someone fails a test.

The training is continuously updated to keep pace with emerging attack techniques by blending educational content with practical, hands-on exposure to realistic threat scenarios.

“Our task is to give organizations clarity in a landscape that is changing extremely quickly,” explained co-founder and Chief Executive Brian Long. “The threat is evolving in real time. Our responsibility is to move at least as fast.”

Since its public launch in January this year, Adaptive has grown to more than 500 enterprise customers. Notable customers include PayPal Holdings Inc., Xerox Holdings Corp., Bose Corp., the National Hockey League, the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, Figma Inc., Ramp Business Corp., Vimeo Inc., TaylorMade Golf Co. Inc. and Perplexity AI Inc.

The Series B round was led by Bain Capital Ventures LP, with NVentures (Nvidia Corp.’s venture capital arm), the OpenAI Startup Fund LP, Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, Capital One Ventures and Citi Ventures Inc. also participating.

“The surge in AI-enabled threat vectors has elevated human-layer security to a board-level priority and Adaptive is emerging as the platform organizations rely on to stay ahead of these threats,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures.

Adaptive had previously raised rounds of $43 million in April and $12 million in September.

Photo: Adaptive Security