Be a part of our day by day and weekly newsletters for the newest updates and unique content material on industry-leading AI protection. Be taught Extra
New York-based Jericho Safety has secured $15 million in Sequence A funding to scale its AI-powered cybersecurity coaching platform. The funding, introduced at present, follows the corporate’s profitable five-month execution of a $1.8 million Division of Protection contract that put the two-year-old startup on the cybersecurity map.
“Inside minutes, a classy attacker can now create a voice clone that sounds precisely like your CFO requesting an pressing wire switch,” stated Sage Wohns, co-founder and Chief Govt Officer of Jericho Safety, in an unique interview with VentureBeat. “Conventional cybersecurity coaching merely hasn’t stored tempo with these threats.”
The funding spherical was led by Jasper Lau at Period Fund, who beforehand backed the corporate’s $3 million seed spherical in August 2023. Further traders embrace Lux Capital, Sprint Fund, Gaingels Enterprise Fund and Gaingels AI Fund, Distique Ventures, Plug & Play Ventures, and several other specialised enterprise corporations.
Army cybersecurity contract established credibility in aggressive market
Jericho’s profile rose considerably final November when the Pentagon chosen the corporate for its first generative AI protection contract. The $1.8 million award via AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Air Power, charged Jericho with defending army personnel from more and more subtle phishing assaults.
“There was a extremely publicized spear-phishing assault focusing on Air Power drone pilots utilizing faux consumer manuals,” Wohns famous in an earlier interview. The incident underscored how even extremely skilled personnel can fall sufferer to fastidiously crafted deception.
This federal contract helped Jericho stand out in a crowded cybersecurity market the place established gamers like KnowBe4, Proofpoint, and Cofense dominate. Trade analysts worth the safety consciousness coaching sector at $5 billion yearly, with projected development to $10 billion by 2027 as organizations more and more acknowledge human vulnerability as their major safety weak point.
How AI fights AI: Automated adversaries that study worker weaknesses
In contrast to typical safety coaching that depends on static templates and predictable eventualities, Jericho’s platform employs what Wohns calls “agentic AI” — autonomous techniques that behave like precise attackers.
“If an worker ignores a suspicious e mail, our system would possibly comply with up with a textual content message that seems to come back from their supervisor,” Wohns defined. “Similar to actual attackers, our AI adapts to conduct, studying which approaches work finest in opposition to particular people.”
This multi-channel strategy addresses a basic limitation of conventional safety coaching: most packages put together workers for yesterday’s assaults, not tomorrow’s. Jericho’s simulations can span e mail, voice, textual content messaging, and even video calls, creating customized assault eventualities primarily based on an worker’s position, conduct patterns, and former responses.
The corporate’s shopper dashboard reveals which workers fall for which varieties of assaults, permitting organizations to ship focused remediation. Early information means that workers skilled with adaptive, AI-driven simulations are 64% much less prone to fall for precise phishing makes an attempt than those that obtain conventional safety consciousness coaching.
Singapore CFO loses $500,000 to deepfake govt impersonation
The monetary stakes of those new threats turned clear in a case Wohns highlighted involving a finance govt deceived by artificially generated variations of firm management.
“A CFO in Singapore was deceived into transferring almost $500,000 throughout a video name that appeared to incorporate the corporate’s CEO and different executives,” Wohns recounted. “Unbeknownst to the CFO, these contributors had been AI-generated deepfakes, crafted utilizing publicly accessible movies and recordings.”
The assault started with a seemingly harmless WhatsApp message requesting an pressing Zoom assembly. In the course of the name, the deepfake avatars persuaded the CFO to authorize the switch. Solely when the attackers tried to extract extra funds did suspicions come up, ultimately involving authorities who recovered the preliminary switch.
Such incidents have gotten alarmingly frequent. In keeping with Resemble AI’s Q1 2025 Deepfake Incident Report, monetary losses from deepfake-enabled fraud exceeded $200 million globally throughout simply the primary quarter of 2025. The report discovered that North America skilled the best variety of incidents (38%), adopted by Asia (27%) and Europe (21%).
Trade reviews have documented staggering development charges lately, with some research displaying deepfake fraud makes an attempt rising by greater than 1,700% in North America and exceeding 2,000% in sure European monetary sectors.
New risk horizon: When AI techniques assault different AI techniques
Wohns recognized an much more regarding rising risk that few safety groups are ready for: “AI brokers phishing AI brokers.”
“As AI instruments proliferate inside firms from buyer assist chatbots to inside automations, attackers are starting to focus on and exploit these brokers immediately,” he defined. “It’s not simply people being deceived. AI techniques are actually each the targets and the unwitting accomplices of compromise.”
This represents a basic shift within the cybersecurity panorama. When organizations deploy AI assistants that may entry inside techniques, approve requests, or present info, they create new assault surfaces that conventional safety approaches don’t tackle.
Self-service platform opens entry to smaller companies as assault targets broaden
Whereas main enterprises have lengthy been major targets for stylish assaults, smaller organizations are more and more discovering themselves in cybercriminals’ crosshairs. Recognizing this development, Jericho has launched a self-service platform that enables firms to deploy AI-powered safety coaching with out the enterprise gross sales cycle.
“The self-service registration is along with our enterprise gross sales strategy,” Wohns stated. “Self-Service is designed to offer no-touch/low-touch for Small to Medium Companies.”
Customers can join a seven-day free trial and discover the product with out gross sales conferences. This strategy stands in distinction to {industry} norms, the place cybersecurity options usually contain prolonged procurement processes and high-touch gross sales approaches.
Future-proofing safety as AI capabilities speed up
The $15 million funding will primarily fund three initiatives: increasing analysis and improvement, scaling go-to-market methods via partnerships, and rising Jericho’s group with a give attention to AI and cybersecurity expertise.
“One among our greatest technical challenges has been maintaining tempo with the fast evolution of AI itself,” stated Wohns. “The instruments, fashions, and methods are bettering at a unprecedented fee, which suggests our structure must be versatile sufficient to adapt rapidly.”
Early clients have responded enthusiastically to Jericho’s strategy. “Prospects have been exceedingly pissed off on the lack of innovation with incumbent options and the following decline in efficacy,” Wohns famous. “Inside 30 days, clients determine vulnerabilities throughout a number of channels and construct extremely customized and dynamic remediation packages primarily based on modern threats and methods.”
Because the boundaries between human and machine communications blur, the very nature of belief in digital environments is being redefined. The manager on a video name, the pressing e mail from IT assist, or the customer support chatbot won’t be what they seem. On this new actuality, Jericho Safety is betting that one of the best protection isn’t simply educating workers to be suspicious — it’s displaying them precisely how they’ll be deceived earlier than the actual attackers get the prospect
