AI security startup Outtake raises $40M from Iconiq, Satya Nadella, Bill Ackman, and other big names

Outtake, a startup building an agentic cybersecurity platform designed to help enterprises detect, investigate, and shut down identity-based fraud, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round.

While the size of the round may appear modest compared with the massive sums flowing into some AI startups, the list of investors involved reads like a who’s who of the technology and finance worlds.

The round was led by Murali Joshi of Iconiq, who has previously helped guide Iconiq’s investments in companies such as Anthropic, Datadog, Drata, and 1Password.

The angel investor roster is unusually deep. Participants include Satya Nadella, Nikesh Arora, Bill Ackman, Shyam Sankar, Trae Stephens, former OpenAI vice president Bob McGrew, Guillermo Rauch, and former AT&T chief executive John Donovan.

Outtake was founded in 2023 by Alex Dhillon, a former Palantir engineer. The company focuses on automating a traditionally manual, labour-intensive process: identifying and removing digital impersonation and identity abuse. This includes fake social media accounts, malicious domains designed to mimic legitimate companies, rogue mobile apps, fraudulent advertisements, and related threats.

The challenge has intensified as AI tools have made attackers faster and more convincing, allowing impersonation campaigns to scale rapidly across the internet.

That scepticism faded after Iconiq conducted deeper product reviews and customer diligence, Joshi said. “They’ve turned a ‘human problem’ into a ‘software problem.’ Seeing AI take down digital frauds in real time is a game-changer for brand safety.”

Dhillon said his time at Palantir played a significant role in attracting such a prominent group of angel investors. “I worked directly for Shyam Sankar at Palantir when I was part of the experimental product team,” he said. Through that experience, Dhillon built relationships with many current and former Palantir executives, including Stephens, who spent his early career at the company and is now also a venture capitalist with Founders Fund.

Those early connections led to a chain of introductions that ultimately resulted in backing from several high-profile technology and finance leaders.

Outtake counts OpenAI, Pershing Square, AppLovin, and multiple federal agencies among its customers. In July 2025, OpenAI publicly profiled Outtake as an example of an agentic AI startup built on its reasoning models.

The company says its business has expanded rapidly. According to Outtake, annual recurring revenue has grown sixfold year over year, while its customer base has increased more than tenfold. Over the past year alone, the company reports that its systems scanned roughly 20 million potential cyberattacks.