Adaptive Security has raised an $81 million in Series B funding as it scales a platform designed to help organizations defend against AI-enabled impersonation, deepfakes, and multi-channel social engineering attacks. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Citi Ventures.
The financing is Adaptive’s third funding announcement in 2025 and brings the company’s total capital raised to $146.5 million. In April, Adaptive announced a $43 million Series A led by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, which the company described as OpenAI’s first and only cybersecurity investment. The OpenAI Startup Fund later led an additional $12 million follow-on investment that Adaptive announced in September.
Founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones, Adaptive is positioning its product as a modern replacement for legacy security awareness training that was built primarily for email-based phishing rather than generative AI deception across voice, video, text, and other channels. The founders constructed previously Attentive, which they grew to $500 million in annual revenue, and say the rapid shift in impersonation capabilities has turned what was once a niche concern into an operational risk affecting employees and consumers.
Adaptive said it has grown to more than 500 enterprise customers in less than one year since its public launch in January 2025 and reported a net promoter score of 94. The company’s customer list includes PayPal, Xerox, Bose, the National Hockey League, the Professional Golfers’ Association, Figma, Ramp, Vimeo, TaylorMade Golf, and Perplexity, among others.
The company’s platform uses AI to simulate impersonation scenarios across voice calls, text messages, video, and email, testing how employees and existing controls respond under realistic conditions. Adaptive said the simulations can identify where defenses are likely to fail and then deliver individualized training based on employee behavior. The platform also includes automated threat triage and an AI-driven executive risk scoring capability intended to help organizations identify teams, workflows, and roles that may be most exposed to high-impact social engineering attempts.
Adaptive framed the financing as a response to growing demand from both customers and investors as deepfake-enabled fraud expands beyond inboxes into phone calls, messaging, and video chat. The company cited industry dynamics indicating that social engineering accounts for more than 95% of successful cyber breaches, and pointed to a sharp rise in deepfake incidents, including a reported 17 times increase from 2023 to 2024 and more than 100,000 incidents in the U.S. alone. Adaptive also said that in 2025, it had seen increased deepfake activity and that more than half of its customer conversations had included reports of deepfake incidents.
With NVIDIA joining the round through NVentures, Adaptive said it plans to advance efforts to secure AI systems and protect the people who work with them, while continuing to expand product capabilities focused on human layer security. Bain Capital Ventures said it is backing the company based on the founders’ prior track record and the increasing visibility of AI-enabled social engineering as a board-level issue.
KEY QUOTES:
“Over the past year, we have watched AI impersonations evolve from experimental to everyday,” said Brian Long, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Security. “A few seconds of audio or a short video clip is now enough for anyone to generate a convincing clone. That shift forces organizations to prepare for scenarios where even familiar voices, faces, or messages can no longer be taken at face value. Our task is to give organizations clarity in a landscape that is changing extremely quickly. The threat is evolving in real time. Our responsibility is to move at least as fast.”
Brian Long, CEO And Co Founder, Adaptive Security
“Brian and Andrew have been longtime members of the Bain Capital Ventures portfolio spanning TapCommerce, Attentive and now Adaptive, and we have deep conviction in their ability to build and scale category-defining products,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “The surge in AI-enabled threat vectors has elevated human-layer security to a board-level priority, and Adaptive is emerging as the platform organizations rely on to stay ahead of these threats. We are proud to support this team as they tackle one of the most important challenges facing businesses and consumers today.”
Enrique Salem, Partner, Bain Capital Ventures
