AI Security Firm Alice Raises $140M, Bringing Total to $280M

Tricking a chatbot and getting an AI agent to act outside its own permissions are different problems. With OpenAI and Anthropic both reportedly using their own AI to hack outside companies, an arms race of AI attacking and defending AI is already underway. Into that market, Alice has announced a $140 million funding round led by Apax Digital, with new participation from Samsung Electronics, SentinelOne, Maj Invest, MoreTech, and Phoenix Insurance, alongside existing investors Resolute Ventures, Grove Ventures, CRV, Highland Europe, Vintage Investments, Norwest Venture Partners, NFX, and Claltech. The round brings Alice’s total funding to $280 million, and Apax Digital is joining the board. Reported valuations for the deal range from $700 million to $1 billion depending on the outlet — Alice itself has not disclosed a figure.

Alice was founded in 2018 in Israel and the US under the name ActiveFence, a trust-and-safety company that spent nearly a decade tracking fraud, extremism, and coordinated manipulation across large platforms like Meta, TikTok, and Amazon. That work built Rabbit Hole, which the company calls the world’s largest dataset of real-world adversarial and harmful content. In January, the company rebranded as Alice to extend that same expertise to securing AI models. “At the end of last year, I realized we hadn’t abandoned the past — the future is just bigger,” CEO and co-founder Noam Schwartz said of the rebrand.

Alice works across the full AI lifecycle. Before a model ships, its researchers work with labs including Anthropic, Google, and Cohere, simulating malicious prompts and agentic tasks to harden models against jailbreaks and prompt injection. Once a model is live, Alice helps enterprises define their own policies, simulate attacks to surface compliance risks and data leaks, and monitor inputs and outputs in real time. The company runs one of the world’s largest AI security research labs, with more than 150 researchers, works with 8 of the 10 leading AI model labs, and says it protects more than 3 billion people online.

The International AI Safety Report 2026, written by more than 100 experts, found that even well-defended models can still be broken at a high rate, with new attack techniques emerging faster than defenses close them. Independent research group METR has catalogued dozens of cases of AI agents acting beyond their given scope, in some cases attempting to conceal it from human oversight. Against that backdrop, Alice says its AI business has grown more than 500% over the past two years and is approaching $100 million in ARR.

“Just as the cloud platform shift created a new category of security, the AI platform shift is opening a rapidly growing attack surface that will only widen as enterprises roll out agents,” said Patrick Kane, Partner at Apax Digital. Eric Levine, Vice President at Apax Digital, added: “Attacks observed in the wild seed the tests, the tests tune the guardrails, and model behavior in production feeds back into both — the loop gets stronger with every observed attack and every new customer.” The funding will go toward advancing Alice’s platform, growing the team behind Rabbit Hole, and scaling its go-to-market team for foundation model labs and enterprises.

The AI security space already has active consolidation. Switzerland-based Lakera was recently acquired by Check Point, and Protect AI was acquired by Palo Alto Networks, as larger security vendors absorb AI-security startups. HiddenLayer remains independent. In Korea, AI security operations center TENEX.AI raised $250 million in April at a valuation topping $1 billion.