According to what the business initially told Axios, Alethea Group—a platform for social media monitoring powered by artificial intelligence—has raised $20 million in a Series B investment headed by Google Ventures.
The fact that Alethea has been able to get funding despite the continued lack of investment in the cybersecurity industry makes it noteworthy.
The company plans to use the money to hire more people and develop a solution that can identify and block foreign bots that spread misinformation online in the run-up to the 2024 US elections.
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Alethea, which has been around since 2019, sifts through internet discourse to identify foreign influence campaigns that target its customers.
Alethea’s machine-learning platform ingests news articles, social media messages, and other content to monitor harmful user behaviors, the increase of new accounts, and other signs of a misinformation campaign.
Businesses, NGOs, and governments are all potential clients who might use the knowledge regarding a persistent misinformation campaign concerning their services or goods. Far more advanced than the bot-focused schemes of 2016, a new Alethea research uncovered that Russian operators have begun making phony copies of actual news websites to link to in their social media operations.
The gist of it is that the fresh capital will allow Alethea to satisfy the increasing demand from customers, according to CEO Lisa Kaplan’s interview with Axios.
Among the increasing number of startups utilizing AI-enabled technology to assist organizations in monitoring misinformation campaigns and misleading narratives, Alethea is among them. Several well-known cybersecurity investors have joined Alethea, as reported between the lines.
Alethea’s board will include Google Ventures general partner Karim Faris, a recent funder. Ballistic Ventures, led by former AT&T executive Kevin Mandia and Kleiner Perkins partner Ted Schlein, Alethea’s founding investor since its Series A round, also participated in the company’s most recent fundraising. “People kicked the tires on the tried and true, and then when that didn’t work, they started reaching out to us,” Kaplan said.
“People realized that this is the kind of thing where [if] it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen to everybody, and in a lot of ways; it brings together communications and cybersecurity.”
The next step: according to Kaplan, Alethea will be able to increase its staff size from 50 to 75 by the end of the year with the support of the new money.
