Digital Currency Group, Founders Capital, Firestreak Ventures (Walter Kortschak), NVTBL Ventures, and Metaversal Ventures also participated in the round. Other top investors include Crypto.com (Cronos) and senior executives from Citi, UBS, Coinbase, Checkout.com, and Apple.

Founded by Oliver Quie (CEO), Oscar Hayek (CTO), and Tom Ryan (Chief Product Officer), all with deep expertise in AI and decentralisation, Innerworks has developed breakthrough technology to combat sophisticated AI-powered fraud that easily bypasses conventional security systems. The business has already proven impactful in the highest-stakes environments, including banking, national infrastructure defence, and a partnership with the industry-leading incident response firm, ZeroShadow, to detect activity linked to North Korean money launderers behind a $1.5 billion hack – the largest cryptocurrency heist in history.

The need to distinguish authentic human behaviour from sophisticated AI-generated synthetic interactions has never been greater. Almost $200 billion was lost to bot-related attacks in 2024 alone, with the majority of online traffic now comprised of automation tools rather than human users.

Innerworks’ Synthetic Threat Intelligence addresses the fundamental paradigm shift where the primary security challenge is not detecting known bad actors, but distinguishing authentic human behaviour from AI-generated synthetic interactions that are virtually indistinguishable from legitimate users. This threat is only set to increase with fraud attempts by deepfakes having increased by over 2,000% since 2022.

Innerworks delivers powerful risk signals from thousands of real-time data points – yet it integrates with just a few lines of code, running invisibly behind any app or website without disrupting the user experience. The company’s technology has already been adopted by major payments and digital assets firms, including Crypto.com (Cronos), Zero Shadow, who is the lead investigator into a $1.5 billion ByBit hack, a payments network with 150 million+ users, among others.

Central to the Synthetic Threat Intelligence platform is RedTeam, the world's first crypto-bounty platform for adversarial AI hacking. The program harnesses a global network of ethical hackers and AI agents that continuously probe for weaknesses, attack Innerworks' systems, and contribute to its evolving defences.

Innerworks has achieved a 97% detection rate against even the most sophisticated AI threats, outperforming the accuracy of multibillion-dollar companies and all top five incumbent providers in head-to-head comparisons.

"We're facing AI-powered deception that can mimic legitimate users with frightening accuracy," said Oliver Quie, CEO. "Existing security companies have become obsolete because they assume threats will behave differently than legitimate users. Our platform solves this problem using Synthetic Threat Intelligence and decentralised training to defend against even the most sophisticated AI-based attacks”. Quie continues, “Having now proven our approach alongside global brands, we feel Innerworks is well positioned to become core security infrastructure for the wider internet helping to protect user ecosystems online.”

Innerworks plans to use the funding to accelerate product development, expand the RedTeam ecosystem, and scale its presence across global financial centres. Key priorities include expanding the platform's adversarial training capabilities and building strategic partnerships with tier-one financial institutions that are taking an active approach to combat synthetic threats.

"We invested in Innerworks because they're not incrementally improving fraud detection, they're fundamentally reimagining it," said Cat Mcdonald, Partner at AlbionVC. "Their ability to detect what other systems miss represents an essential new security layer for the financial sector's response to this new threat landscape."

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