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

Outtake, which builds a cybersecurity platform to help businesses detect, investigate and eliminate identity fraud, has raised a $40 million Series B funding round.

While that may not sound like much given the huge sums some AI companies are raising, the names involved in this funding look like a who’s who of the tech industry.

The round was led by Iconiq’s Murali Joshi, who helped lead the company’s investments in companies such as Anthropic, Datadog, Drata, 1Password, among others.

Among the angels who invested is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. Pershing Square Holdings CEO Bill Ackman. Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar; Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens; Former VP of OpenAI Bob McGrew. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and former AT&T CEO John Donovan. Whew!

The reason for the excitement? Outtake, founded in 2023 by a former Palantir engineer, Alex Dhillon, found a way to automate what had been a largely manual problem of detecting and removing digital identity fraud: impersonation accounts, malicious domains posing as the company’s, rogue apps, fraudulent ads, and more. This problem has become even more difficult because artificial intelligence has allowed attackers to be more persuasive and faster in their efforts.

“We kept hearing whispers in our network about an AI company finally solving digital counterfeiting at scale. Frankly, we were skeptical,” Joshi told TechCrunch. “Historically, detection and takedown was (and to some extent still is) a manual, human-intensive process that couldn’t keep up with the speed of the internet.”

But once Iconiq tested the product and did due diligence with customers, the investor became loyal, he said. “They have turned a ‘human problem’ into a ‘software problem.’ Seeing AI take down digital fraud in real time is a game changer for brand safety,” he said.

Outtake lists among its customers OpenAI, Pershing Square, AppLovin and federal agencies. OpenAI even company profiles in July 2025 as an example of a representative startup based on its reasoning models.

The company says it has seen significant growth across the board, with annual recurring revenue increasing sixfold year-on-year and its customer base growing more than tenfold. Last year alone, Outtake says, its systems detected 20 million potential cyberattacks.