Today we’re launching Asymmetric Security, the first full-stack AI Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) company. We’ve responded to hundreds of cyber attacks using AI systems we develop internally. Building on this experience, we’re creating realistic training scenarios and evaluations to improve both our AI cyberdefense capabilities and those of frontier labs.
Our mission is to accelerate AI cyberdefense to address the security challenges of the AGI era.
We’ve raised a $4.2M pre-seed led by Chad Byers at Susa Ventures, with participation from others including Halcyon Ventures, Overlook Ventures, Seldon Lab, Matt Clifford, Geoff Ralston, Charlie Songhurst, and AI and security leaders from Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
The future is deep
Modern security stacks are good at scanning broadly and bad at going deep. They generate oceans of alerts, most of which are never fully understood. When something slips through, organizations fall back on an expensive and scarce resource: human digital forensics experts, who conduct deep cybersecurity investigations. Organizations use them sparingly, primarily after a confirmed breach.
Cyber threats lie in the gap between surface-level detection and deep understanding.
This will change in a world with abundant intelligence. AI agents will not just replace humans in existing workflows, but make new kinds of work possible; work that was previously too slow or expensive to perform at scale.
In cyberdefense, one of the biggest shifts will be the rise of automated digital forensics as a method of threat detection. When digital forensics is automated, it will no longer need to be reactive or rare. It could become the new standard for threat detection.
Our goal is to realize this future as soon as possible.
Unfair advantages
For the first time, software is eating services, and full-stack AI DFIR services is a venture-scale business in its own right. AI can automate forensic investigations, previously the sole purview of forensic experts, enabling the business to scale like software.
But it also creates unfair technical and distribution advantages as we look towards a future where digital forensics revolutionises threat detection.
During the transition to cloud computing, CrowdStrike was founded as a DFIR services firm. They used that wedge to reinvent threat detection for the cloud era, and became one of the world’s largest cybersecurity companies.
We believe that DFIR services are an even better wedge in the AI era.
Having DFIR staff investigating real-world incidents enables us to build high-fidelity evaluations and generate expert reasoning traces we can use for reinforcement learning. Additionally, it creates tight product development feedback loops; internal DFIR analysts use our AI systems, enabling us to rapidly identify and implement improvements.
Incident response services also enable us to earn trusted relationships with enterprises we are serving during an emergency. In cybersecurity, trust is key to distribution, and the best time to sell cybersecurity is right after a crisis.
Join us
We’ve assembled a talent-dense team of alumni from Stanford, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Networks, Oxford, Cambridge, and beyond. If you want to build the future of defensive security, join us.