Consumer-facing security tools often focus on one type of approach, such as password protection, VPN, or identity management. This forces people to use many tools to keep their data private. With a cloakthe company that instead offers a suite of security and privacy solutions, announced Thursday that it has secured $375 million in Series B funding and growth funding to expand its consumer offering and move into the enterprise market.
The company was founded by brothers Arjun and Abhijay Bhatnagar in 2020 and initially offered users the ability to create multiple identities with data such as emails, phone numbers and passwords to log into different services without providing their real data. Over the years, Cloaked has launched other services such as data removal, identity theft insurance, VPN and dark web monitoring. Last year, it introduced AI-powered call screening.
Now, Cloaked sees an opportunity to protect consumers in a world where hackers or fraudsters can use artificial intelligence to get data or money in new ways.
“We’ve seen artificial intelligence improve on humans in compromising people. And we see it as a personal safety, family safety and financial fraud problem. We also see [AI proliferating] around spam, scams and phishing. And it comes now in this era around surveillance, how do you find a solution that fits between these different aspects and we win in this category from the consumer side,” said the company’s CEO, Arjun Bhatnagar.
The startup plans to expand its AI-powered control protection to text messages, email and browsing this year. It also tests an AI agent that could take actions on your behalf, such as changing the password for a compromised service. Bhatnagar said the plan is to use AI in a secure manner and not transmit sensitive information to the cloud.
The company tells TechCrunch it saw 10x growth last year and now has more than 350,000 paying customers. It has also protected 10 million identities and helped users clean more than 1 billion records from data broker sites. Bhatnagar noted that since the call screening feature was launched last year, the app has processed more than 50 million scam or spam calls.
Cloaked is also now rolling out to the enterprise, offering employees some of the same protection as its consumer products, including identity and password management. This product gives employees alerts about potential fraud. In addition, corporate CISOs can review the risk level of individuals and review aggregated data of records that have been cleaned or fraud stopped. And they can see potential fraud or data out there that can affect the company’s business.
The startup has almost 70 employees and aims to expand the team in various areas such as products, engineering, enterprise sales and international expansion.
Cloaked competes with the likes of 1Password, Gaurdio, Firefox, Proton and Mozilla. The company even has some overlapping products with one of its investors, DuckDuckGo, which offers VPN and identity theft protection.
The latest round was led by General Catalyst and Liberty City Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital, Human Capital, Marquee Ventures, Fifth Growth Fund, NFL Players Association, LG Technology Ventures, Assurant Ventures and DuckDuckGo. General Catalyst also provided growth funding through its Customer Value Fund, which provides funding to startups without diluting equity to fuel customer acquisition. The startup did not disclose the valuation or the split between equity and growth funding.
Before that, Cloaked had raised over $29 million in funding from investors including Lux Capital, Human Capital and General Catalyst.
Mark Crane, a partner at General Catalyst, said the venture has invested in the startup in all rounds, but he led a round for the first time. He said Cloaked’s bouquet of security and privacy offerings suits a wide range of consumers.
Crane believes Cloaked has the right product to protect people and businesses in the new AI-driven Internet and become a good “stamp of approval” for users in a world where there are many AI agents.
“In terms of the product, they’ve created tons of surface for the consumer and what they want to be able to use for privacy,” he told TechCrunch after a call. “Some people want to use everything out of the box and some people want to use smaller pieces. And the beauty of Cloaked is that any consumer, anything they’re interested in, can reach out and get the solution they want and need.”
