Alice raises $140M as its AI security business grows more than 500%

SECURITY

AI trust, safety and security company Alice today announced a $140 million funding round led by Apax Digital Funds.

Until a rebrand earlier this year the company was called ActiveFence. It sells adversarial testing and guardrails for AI models, with frontier labs and large enterprises as customers.

Alice began in 2018 as a trust and safety vendor for consumer platforms. For most of its first decade, its analysts tracked fraud rings, extremist networks and coordinated manipulation across those services. Everything they logged fed Rabbit Hole, a service Alice calls the largest dataset of real-world adversarial and harmful content in existence and the attacks stored there now supply the test cases the company fires at AI models.

Most of the frontier labs already work with Alice. The company said the AI portion of the business has grown more than 500% over two years, and annual recurring revenue is nearing $100 million.

The risk it sells against is well-documented. The International AI Safety Report 2026, written with guidance from more than 100 independent experts, found that attacks designed to elicit harmful outputs have gotten harder to pull off, though users can still get them by rephrasing a request or splitting it into smaller steps. Independent research organization METR maintains a public catalog of incidents in which AI agents acted outside the scope they were given. In some of them, the agent tried to hide what it had done.

The work splits across the model lifecycle. Before release, Alice researchers run malicious prompts and agentic tasks against models at labs including Anthropic PBC, Google LLC and Cohere Inc., hunting for jailbreaks and prompt injection paths. Once a model is live, enterprise customers use the platform to set their own policies on what it may do. Customers then simulate attacks against those rules to surface compliance gaps and data leaks. The platform monitors inputs and outputs in production.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Noam Schwartz said the industry is “democratizing capabilities before we’ve democratized the defenses.” Nearly a decade spent watching people abuse technology at the scale of billions is what the company brings to the model era, he said, and the round is about closing that gap.

Patrick Kane, a partner at Apax Digital, drew a comparison with the cloud transition and said the AI platform shift is “opening a rapidly growing attack surface that will only widen as enterprises roll out agents.” Apax Digital will take a seat on the board.

Samsung, SentinelOne Inc., Maj Invest, MoreTech and Phoenix Insurance also put money into the round. Existing backers Resolute Ventures, Grove Ventures, CRV, Highland Europe, Vintage Investments, Norwest Venture Partners, NFX and Claltech returned.

Calcalist reported that the round was raised on a valuation of between $700 million and $800 million, but Alice did not disclose the valuation. The new funding takes to total raised by Alice to $280 million.