AI security startup Outtake raises $40M from Iconiq, Satya Nadella, Bill Ackman and other big names

Outtake, which makes a cybersecurity proxy platform to help organizations detect, investigate and remove identity fraud, has raised a $40 million Series B funding round.

While this may not seem like much given the enormity Amounts collected by some artificial intelligence companiesThe names involved in this financing read like who the tech industry is.

The round was led by Iconiq’s Murali Joshi, who has helped lead the company’s investments in companies like Anthropic, Datadog, Drata, 1Password and others.

Angels who have invested include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora; Pershing Square Holdings CEO Bill Ackman; Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar; Anduril co-founder Trae Stevens; former Vice President of OpenAI, Bob McGraw; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and former AT&T CEO John Donovan. Whew!

The reason for the excitement? Outtake, founded by Alex Dillon, a former Palantir engineer, in 2023, has found a way to automate what was largely a manual problem of detecting and removing digital impersonators: impersonating accounts, malicious domains pretending to be from the company, rogue apps, fraudulent ads, and more. This problem has become more difficult because AI has enabled attackers to be more persuasive and faster in their efforts.

“We kept hearing whispers in our network about an AI company that was finally working on solving digital distortion at scale. Frankly, we were skeptical,” Joshi told TechCrunch. “Historically, detection and removal (and to some extent even today) was a manual, human-intensive process that could not keep up with the speed of the Internet.”

But once Iconiq looked at the product and did due diligence with customers, the investor became a believer, he said. They turned a “human problem” into a “software problem.” Seeing AI eliminating digital fraud in real-time is a game-changer for brand safety.

Dillon told TechCrunch that his experience at Palantir is what led him to acquire several high-profile angels. “I worked directly for Shyam Sankar at Palantir when I was part of the experimental product team,” he explained. This led him to meet many of Palantir’s stalwarts, current and former, including Stevens, who worked there in its early years. (Stevens also works as a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.) One introduction led to another that led to moguls writing checks.

Top names among its clients are OpenAI, Pershing Square, AppLovin, and federal agencies. OpenAI Even a glimpse of the company in July 2025 as an example of an agent startup built on its own inference models.

The company says it has seen significant growth everywhere, with annual recurring revenue increasing six-fold over last year and its customer base growing more than ten-fold. Last year alone, Outtake says its systems examined 20 million potential cyberattacks.