Adaptive Security announced an $81 mn Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture arm, OpenAI Startup Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Citi Ventures.
The raise marks the company’s third funding announcement this year and lifts total capital raised to $146.5 mn.
The deal follows a busy year. In April, Adaptive closed a $43 mn Series A led by OpenAI Startup Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, the first cybersecurity investment backed by OpenAI. A further $12 mn follow-on round arrived in September, again led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Investor interest tracks customer demand. Less than a year after its public launch in January 2025, Adaptive reports more than 500 enterprise customers and a net promoter score of 94.
Its customer list spans PayPal, Xerox, Bose, the National Hockey League, the Professional Golfers’ Association, Figma, Ramp, Vimeo, TaylorMade Golf, and Perplexity.
The company was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones after watching AI-driven impersonation move from edge case to daily operational risk.
Both founders previously built Attentive into a business generating about $500 mn in annual revenue. They say traditional security awareness programs simply weren’t designed for generative AI deception.
“Over the past year, we have watched AI impersonations evolve from experimental to everyday,” said Long, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Security.
A few seconds of audio or a short video clip is now enough for anyone to generate a convincing clone. That shift forces organizations to prepare for scenarios where even familiar voices, faces, or messages can no longer be taken at face value.
Social engineering still sits behind more than 95% of successful cyber breaches. Email used to dominate. That’s changing.
Phone calls, text messages, and video platforms now carry a growing share of malicious activity. Deepfake incidents jumped 17x between 2023 and 2024, with more than 100,000 reported cases in the US alone.
Adaptive says the trend hasn’t slowed. In 2025, the company saw a rise in AI deepfake activity, with more than half of customer conversations referencing real incidents.
These attacks hit executives, frontline staff, and consumers, often through cloned voices, fabricated video, or tailored scams that feel uncomfortably personal.
Adaptive’s platform uses AI to simulate impersonation across voice, text, video, and email. The simulations expose where controls fail and trigger tailored training based on how employees respond.
The system also includes automated threat triage and AI-driven executive risk scoring to surface teams and workflows carrying the highest exposure.
Our task is to give organizations clarity in a landscape that is changing extremely quickly. The threat is evolving in real time. Our responsibility is to move at least as fast.
Support from NVIDIA signals a tighter link between AI infrastructure and security tooling. Continued backing from the OpenAI Startup Fund reflects growing concern among AI developers about how generative models get misused.
Together, the investor group points to a shared view that AI impersonation now sits firmly in the mainstream risk category.
Brian and Andrew have been longtime members of the Bain Capital Ventures portfolio spanning TapCommerce, Attentive, and now Adaptive, and we have deep conviction in their ability to build and scale category-defining products
Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures
Enrique Salem added that AI-driven threats have pushed human-layer security onto board agendas faster than many expected.
Adaptive positions itself squarely in that gap. The company focuses on preventing AI-driven social engineering rather than chasing infrastructure exploits. As generative models spread and impersonation gets cheaper, that focus looks less theoretical and more operational by the quarter.
