Outtake Secures $40M to Expand Automated Threat Response Technology

A startup founded by a former Palantir engineer has secured $40 million in funding to advance its automated digital risk protection and expand its open-source intelligence capabilities. This funding round, led by ICONIQ, aims to bolster Outtake’s operations, particularly its use of agents and multimodal artificial intelligence models to combat online risks, including impersonations and sophisticated threat campaigns.

Founded in 2023, Outtake has evolved rapidly, with a workforce of 44 and a total funding of $60 million, following a $16.5 million Series A round in April 2025 led by Charles River Ventures. The company’s founder and CEO, Alex Dhillon, previously served at Palantir in an AI experimental engineer role. Dhillon emphasizes the company’s lean operations and growing traction, suggesting a strategic push to capitalize on market demand.

Dhillon notes that recent years have marked a surge in attacks driven by generative AI, resulting in increasingly sophisticated brand impersonations and phishing attacks. The lead investor, ICONIQ, is committed to pursuing substantial growth rather than quick exits, aligning with Outtake’s ambition to develop a platform-scale cybersecurity firm prepared for public markets.

Outtake’s digital risk protection platform is designed to identify and neutralize impersonation and phishing attacks, along with fraudulent websites and fake social media accounts. Unlike many competitors that offer generic open-source intelligence feeds, Outtake transforms this data into an investigative and automation engine, facilitating meaningful and immediate responses to threats.

The integration of open-source intelligence enhances Outtake’s digital risk protection, allowing the firm to quickly associate threats with their broader context. This capability enables proactive measures against potential attacks, setting Outtake apart from traditional vendors reliant on human labor and ad hoc relationships for threat detection and response.

As Dhillon explains, the firm’s automated approach contrasts sharply with industry norms. Outtake has established programmatic connections with major infrastructure providers such as Cloudflare and AWS, ensuring faster and more reliable takedown processes. This engineering-led strategy facilitates high-quality evidence collection for remediation, allowing Outtake to effectively handle a high volume of threats.

Moreover, Dhillon critiques traditional cybersecurity models that depend heavily on keyword-based searches, arguing that they miss a significant portion of malicious activities occurring in multimedia formats. Outtake leverages multimodal models that can detect threats embedded within images or videos, thereby addressing the ever-increasing volume of non-textual online content.

Among Outtake’s notable competitors are ZeroFox, which has played a pivotal role in shaping the digital risk protection category. While Dhillon acknowledges ZeroFox’s impact, he asserts that Outtake’s automation-first methodology typically provides superior results in direct competition. Other adversaries in open-source intelligence include Recorded Future and Dataminr, though Outtake differentiates itself by translating threat intelligence into actionable measures.