Cinder Raises $41M Series B for Trust and Safety Infrastructure
Cinder (cinder.ai), the trust and safety platform protecting some of the biggest names in tech from online abuse, has raised $41 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Accel, Y Combinator, M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund), and PSP Growth. The company's earlier backers include Accel and Pioneer Fund, which invested at the seed stage.
Accel led both Cinder's $4 million seed round and its $10 million Series A, making this the first round with a new lead. The company plans to use the funding to double headcount over the next 12 months and has opened its corporate headquarters in New York City.
Cinder builds software that helps platforms detect and respond to digital threats like fraud, AI prompt abuse, and non-consensual intimate imagery. The platform lets businesses orchestrate and automate digital safety at scale, training AI agents on a company's own policies so enforcement decisions happen in real time across every guideline.
The customer list speaks for itself. Platforms including OpenAI, Spotify, Depop, and Black Forest Labs use Cinder to handle trust and safety challenges that traditional content moderation tools weren't designed for.
"Trust and safety has gone from a back-office function to critical infrastructure that directly affects enterprise value and brand integrity."
— Ryan Shannon, Partner at Radical Ventures
The founding team includes former US Government, Palantir, and Meta trust and safety experts. CEO Glen Wise is a former CIA cyber analyst who went on to work as a security engineer on Facebook's threat discovery team. Co-founder Phil Brennan ran counterterrorism units for the US government before joining Facebook in 2017 to build out their community threat intelligence team, where he worked with Wise for several years.
The broader thesis here is straightforward: as AI-generated content proliferates and AI agents increasingly act on behalf of companies, the surface area for abuse is growing faster than legacy moderation tools can keep up. Cinder is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that sits between a platform's policies and the messy reality of enforcement at scale.
Sara Ittelson, Partner at Accel, put it in infrastructure terms, comparing Cinder to identity or payments as a layer that modern platforms can't do without.