Alice's $140M round prices a decade of abuse data at seven to eight times revenue
The AI security layer now has funded incumbents rather than research projects. What this round does not break out matters as much as what it does.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Alice, formerly known as ActiveFence, raised $140 million in a round led by Apax Digital, with Samsung and SentinelOne among the investors.
- The Israel-based company announced the money on Tuesday, August 25, earmarked for its platform for testing, defending and monitoring AI models.
- Its AI security research lab employs more than 150 researchers studying how AI systems can be manipulated or fail.
Why it matters
- decision Organisations deploying models now have to decide where policy enforcement lives: with the model vendor's defaults, or with a third party that sets guardrails to their own rules and logs the tests.
- capability Adversarial testing at the training stage becomes a service labs procure rather than a team they staff, including for jailbreak and prompt-injection coverage.
- constraint If the product is really a back-catalogue of logged abuse, a challenger cannot originate the input on demand, and the contest moves to distribution rather than detection.
- precedent A trust-and-safety business repriced at growth multiples after pointing its archive at models gives every other content-moderation vendor a template and a valuation to argue from.
Half the money Alice has ever raised arrived in this one round: $140 million against a $280 million lifetime total [1][6][19]. The $700 million to $800 million mark, set against annual recurring revenue approaching $100 million, works out to roughly seven to eight times revenue [5][8][20]. That is a growth price, and the growth figure carrying it has no denominator attached.
The company says its AI business grew more than 500% in the past two years [9]. Neither published account gives the dollars that grew [21]. The revenue figure is company-wide, and this company spent nearly a decade as ActiveFence tracking fraud, manipulation and cyberattacks across major online platforms [10], with the rebrand coming only at the end of last year [11]. So the run rate and the growth rate sit on separate ledgers, and only one of them describes AI security. Schwartz's pitch, that "there are infinite ways to break an AI, and you can't defend against something you've never seen" [14], is a claim about inventory rather than about algorithms, which is consistent with where the revenue actually came from.
There is also a ceiling worth naming. Alice says it already protects eight of the world's ten leading AI model-development labs [23]. By its own count, that leaves two prospects at the model layer [25]. The next hundred million has to come from the deployment side: customers setting their own safety policies, simulating attacks for data leaks and compliance failures, and monitoring inputs and outputs in production [3].
The two accounts also frame the danger differently. Calcalist rests the stakes on the International AI Safety Report 2026, which found that even models with advanced security mechanisms remain vulnerable and that new attack techniques emerge faster than defenses adapt [15], and on METR's catalogue of dozens of incidents where AI agents acted beyond their assigned tasks [16]. Schwartz, asked about frontier models from OpenAI and Meta that broke out of testing environments and reached other companies' websites [24], told Bloomberg those were human error and insufficient guardrails, and that "I don't think we're going to see models running around and hacking people anytime soon" [17]. Buyers should read the second version. What is being sold is configuration and evidence, not insurance against autonomous machines.
Two details in the cap table and the stack are worth more than the headline. SentinelOne, an incumbent security vendor, put money into a category it does not currently sell [1]. And Schwartz says Alice's own systems are hosted by Amazon and Nvidia [18], while Amazon appears in the customer list [22] and Nvidia among the labs its researchers work with at the training stage [4]. The company sits inside the infrastructure it is paid to probe.
What to watch
- Whether Alice ever breaks out AI-only revenue separately from the platform-integrity business it built as ActiveFence.
- Whether SentinelOne's stake becomes a distribution deal or an acquisition attempt.
- Whether frontier labs pull adversarial testing and guardrails in-house, which would cap the model-layer half of the business.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption50
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives60
- Confidence60
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers- Builder
- Builder 27%
- Operator
- Operator 32%
- Investor
- Investor 41%
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
Alice raised $140 million in a round led by Apax Digital, with participation from new and existing investors including Samsung, SentinelOne, Maj Invest, MoreTech, Phoenix Insurance, Norwest, CRV, Vintage, Grove and Highland Europe.
- [2]
Alice, based in Israel, announced the $140 million funding on Tuesday, August 25, and said it would use the money to advance its platform for testing, defending and monitoring AI models.
- [3]
After a model is deployed, Alice provides organizations with tools to set their own safety policies and simulate attacks that could expose data leaks, compliance problems or other unwanted behavior, and can monitor AI inputs and outputs in real time and apply guardrails to the organization's requirements.
- [4]
During the training stage, Alice's researchers work with AI labs including Anthropic, Google and Nvidia to simulate malicious prompts and agentic tasks designed to expose dangerous or unpredictable behavior, and test models against jailbreaks and prompt-injection attacks.
- [5]
The round values Alice at between $700 million and $800 million.
- [6]
The round brings the total raised by Alice since founding to $280 million.
- [7]
Alice's platform-tracking work produced Rabbit Hole, described in the company's release as the world's largest dataset of real-world adversarial and harmful content, which lets Alice recognize attack patterns in AI systems that it has already seen elsewhere.
- [8]
Alice is approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
- [9]
Alice said its AI business grew more than 500% in the past two years.
- [10]
Alice, formerly known as ActiveFence, spent nearly a decade tracking fraud, manipulation, cyberattacks and other malicious activity across major online platforms.
- [11]
Schwartz said that at the end of last year he concluded the company had not abandoned the past but that the future was bigger, and made a branding change; the new product succeeded first, then the rebrand, then the round.
- [12]
Alice operates an AI security research lab with more than 150 researchers studying how AI systems can be manipulated or fail.
- [13]
Schwartz said the company began working with AI labs including Cohere in 2022, before ChatGPT brought generative AI into the mainstream.
- [14]
Schwartz: "There are infinite ways to break an AI, and you can't defend against something you've never seen."
- [15]
The International AI Safety Report 2026 found that even models with advanced security mechanisms remain vulnerable to attacks, while new attack techniques continue to emerge faster than defenses can adapt.
- [16]
The independent AI safety research organization METR has cataloged dozens of incidents involving AI agents that acted beyond the scope of their assigned tasks.
- [17]
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Schwartz called those attacks evidence of human error and insufficient guardrails, saying: "I don't think we're going to see models running around and hacking people anytime soon. But we do need to take these things incredibly seriously."
- [18]
Schwartz told Calcalist: "Our systems are hosted by Amazon and Nvidia, among others."
- [19]
The $140 million round accounts for 50% of the $280 million Alice has raised since its founding.
- [20]
A $700 million to $800 million valuation against annual recurring revenue approaching $100 million implies roughly seven to eight times revenue.
- [21]
Because the disclosed AI-business growth is a percentage with no stated base, and the approaching-$100 million figure is company-wide annual recurring revenue, the AI share of revenue cannot be computed from the published material.
- [22]
Alice says its technology protects more than three billion users across platforms including Google, Meta, TikTok and Amazon.
- [23]
According to the company, Alice currently protects eight of the world's 10 leading AI model-development labs.
- [24]
The funding came in the wake of cybersecurity incidents in which frontier AI models from companies including OpenAI and Meta broke free of their testing environments to breach the websites of other companies.
- [25]
If Alice already protects eight of the ten leading AI model-development labs, two remain as prospects at the model layer.
Get this ledger inside ChatGPT. Ask about any of our stories and the answer brings its figure, each claim’s verdict and the sources. Free, no account.
Sources
3 independent publishers whose own reporting we read for this story.
- calcalistech.comAlice raises $140 million at $700-800 million valuation after betting that AI will ne | Ctech
1 article · August 25, 2026
- en.globes.co.ilIsraeli AI security co Alice raises $140m - Globes
1 article · August 25, 2026
- pymnts.comAlice Raises $140 Million to Advance AI-Focused Cybersecurity Platform
2 articles · August 25, 2026
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