Cybersecurity startup StrongestLayer Inc. launched today and announced it has raised $5.2 million in new funding to expand development and deployment of its large language model-native email security platform.
Founded in 2024, StrongestLayer offers a platform focused on defending organizations against the next wave of artificial intelligence-powered email threats. The email threats include cybercriminals using AI to create sophisticated, personalized spear-phishing campaigns in seconds with zero technical expertise that are increasingly difficult to detect.
As generative AI rapidly transforms the threat landscape, StrongestLayer argues that traditional email security solutions that are reliant on static rules and pattern-matching have become increasingly ineffective. The company has as its mission to close the growing security gap by delivering a new approach rooted in advanced AI reasoning and intent analysis.
StrongestLayer’s platform is based on what the company calls a Threat Reasoning AI Correlation Engine — TRACE for short — which mimics the analytical skills of expert security analysts at scale. TRACE uses natural language understanding and behavior modeling to assess the intent behind messages rather than relying on keyword filters or historical attack patterns, allowing it to catch highly personalized and linguistically evasive phishing attempts.
The LLM-native architecture offered in the company’s solution is ideally suited to detect AI-generated emails that exploit tone, structure and subtle manipulation — tactics that are now cheap and easy to deploy with public AI tools.
Along with threat detection, StrongestLayer also offers in-workflow risk coaching that helps employees build real-world awareness of emerging phishing strategies. The platform delivers personalized training at the point of risk by using actual attack data and tactics targeting a given organization. The approach is said by the company to help reduce the burden on information technology teams while additionally improving the overall security posture by turning users into a proactive line of defense.
The StrongestLayer platform also includes predictive phishing campaign detection, which proactively identifies fraudulent infrastructure, such as fake websites and synthetic company profiles, days after they are created. The company’s AI-driven analysis has already helped detect and convict nearly 4 million fake websites within a year.
The seed round was led by Sorenson Capital, with Recall Capital also participating.
“Traditional email security was built for a world where attackers needed technical skills to craft convincing phishing emails,” said Ken Elefant, a partner at Sorenson Capital. “Now that AI can generate personalized, sophisticated attacks at scale, we need a fundamentally different approach.”
StrongestLayer’s “LLM-native platform is the first solution we’ve encountered that can truly reason through malicious intent, like a human analyst, but with the speed and scale of a superpowered machine,” Elefant added.
Image: StrongestLayer
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