Building AI to Fight AI: Why Abnormal is Building the World’s First AI-Native Cybersecurity Platform

Abnormal has never been a normal cybersecurity company, and we’ve never wanted to be. While we’ve rapidly grown over the past few years, our mission has remained the same: protect humans with AI.

To continue achieving that mission, today we are announcing a $250M series D investment in Abnormal at a $5.1B valuation. We are proud of the hard work, the AI innovation, and the customer impact we’ve achieved so far, but we feel that our need to protect our customers is greater than ever.

The world needs defensive AI to fight the malicious use of AI that cybercriminals are creating—which is what this funding will enable Abnormal to provide.

A decade ago, cybercriminals were focused on infiltrating systems to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, they’ve become much smarter over the past few years and now focus on a much more vulnerable target: humans themselves.

The most vulnerable endpoint for organizations today is not a machine, but rather human behavior—and the rise of AI has made this an even larger issue. Today, even petty criminals can use tools like ChatGPT and its malicious counterparts to create sophisticated attacks that rival those developed by nation-state actors, and no channel is more vulnerable than your email. After all, email remains the most popular digital communications tool for business today—and also one without built-in security protections, as anyone in the world can use it to reach (or target) someone.

Phishing emails are already one of the leading causes of data breaches, with the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report stating that 68% of all breaches involve the human element. With an increase in AI, these attacks will only get more sophisticated and difficult to detect by the average human, making it impossible for enterprises to defend themselves.

Unfortunately, we are approaching a world in the age of AI where all digital communications cannot be trusted and must be assumed bad until proven otherwise. This future world will make it increasingly difficult to do business, and near impossible when humans can not distinguish between authentic content and a malicious attack.

The solution? Behavioral AI to defend against these AI-powered attacks.

This shift to AI-powered cybercrime underscores the urgent need for advanced, AI-powered security solutions that can keep pace with the growing threat landscape—which is exactly what Abnormal has created. Built with AI at its core, the Abnormal platform leverages state-of-the-art behavioral AI to provide superior protection against the socially-engineered attacks targeting human behavior—understanding human behavior better than humans so we can protect humans better than humans.

And while we started with protecting email as the primary place people work, we continue to expand our platform capabilities to protect all the platforms and applications used by enterprises today. This comprehensive approach in which we provide protection for dozens of tools across email, collaboration, and cloud infrastructure applications enables the people we protect to trust their digital communications.

By integrating via API into each of the everyday cloud applications enterprises use, Abnormal can understand known normal behavior for each person and every digital identity within an organization—achieving unparalleled granularity in our ability to then detect anomalous activity. We are now able to do this beyond the core email and productivity platforms and have expanded to SaaS applications, such as Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow, as well as cloud infrastructure including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

As the first AI-native security company to build an AI-native platform from the ground up, we have capabilities that our competitors simply do not. Abnormal AI can analyze vast amounts of data across the cloud application ecosystem and detect and respond to cyberattacks including phishing, fraud, social engineering, and account takeovers at superhuman speed with superhuman levels of efficacy.

There is no denying that the two biggest technology trends of our time are the move to the cloud and the rise of AI. Today, Abnormal sits at the intersection of both, providing AI-powered protection for human behavior across the entire cloud ecosystem. This unique approach has led to our continued 100% year-over-year revenue growth in our fifth year. As we cross $200M in annual recurring revenue and now protect nearly one out of every five Fortune 500 companies, Abnormal remains the second fastest-growing cybersecurity company of all time.

However, there is still more to be done. Technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and the threat landscape is shifting each day with more sophisticated attacks. Abnormal must also evolve—using new AI technologies to defend against the next generation of attacks.

Our Series D is led by Wellington Management, who felt conviction in the existential threat of AI-powered cyberattacks to our civilization and the need for a generational company to defend against them. We’re excited to use this funding to expand our capabilities, and we plan to invest in three key areas:

1. Product: AI Behavioral Detection and Response Technology: We will continue to invest in the research and development of our core behavioral modeling and autonomous AI decisioning systems. This will not only improve our current products and pave the way for new capabilities, but will also advance our vision of understanding humans better than humans to protect humans better than humans.

2. Market: New Products, Geographies, and Customer Segments: We are expanding our current products beyond email to protect other surface areas in the cloud environment, and we will be announcing a few new products over the next year. Furthermore, we plan to continue our international expansion across Asia and Europe, and expect to complete our FedRAMP authorization within the next few quarters so we can protect the US federal government.

3. Team: Evolving Abnormal to Be a Generational Company: We will grow the Abnormal team by more than 50% this year to support new technology, new customers, new products, and new markets. We must evolve our organization and internal operations for the next chapter of scale as we become a public operating company that is built to last for multiple generations.

Raising new financing is always an inflection point, and I’m reminded today of how far Abnormal has come due to the tireless effort of so many people. To the customers who trust us, the employees who set the bar for excellence, the partners who support our mission, and the investors who continue to believe in us, thank you. You are what makes Abnormal special, and we wouldn’t be here without you.

As with all our milestones, this is a moment of celebration, but we continue to set our sights on the future. After all, we’re just getting started… the best of Abnormal is yet to come.

See what makes Abnormal unique by requesting a demo today, or check out our open roles to join the team!