Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge is addressing one of the biggest problems with social media today, which is the spreading of fake news. New Knowledge utilizes artificial intelligence and human moderators to find the sources of attacks and prevent the spreading of malicious content.
New Knowledge has worked with a number of clients in the defense, energy, entertainment, and financial sectors in order to protect their online communities and brand reputation. And New Knowledge provides these companies with end-to-end disinformation defense solutions in order to monitor and mitigate malicious digital attacks.
In order to take on this problem at scale, New Knowledge recently raised $11 million in funding from existing investor GGV Capital and participation from Lux Capital. With this round of funding, New Knowledge plans to expand upon its sales and marketing teams. And the company will be scaling in new markets as well.
“We are living in an age of information warfare,” said New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan in a statement. “Disinformation campaigns may be highly organized and well-funded state attacks on industry, as well as individual operators trolling the internet to create chaos and division. Attacks against governments and political figures are well documented, and the problem has expanded to include attacks against companies, brands, and public figures. New Knowledge’s mission is to help companies identify these threats early, and to remediate them before they gain momentum and erode a company’s reputation.”
GGV Capital Partner Glenn Solomon pointed out that New Knowledge’s solution goes beyond “social listening” to combat disinformation at the source. This is more reliable than digital media platforms simply thwarting hackers and trolls in a whack-a-mole fashion.
New Knowledge was the first organization outside of the US intelligence community to identify Russia’s plans to influence the presidential election in 2016. And New Knowledge’s executive team have years of expertise when it comes to national security. For example, Morgan served as a Special Advisor to the State Department and heads up Data for Democracy. And COO Ryan Fox supported national security interests as he spent 15 years at the “NSA championing next-generation SIGINT solutions.” And Director of Research Renee DiResta served as an advisor to the State Department, Congress and other state/federal government institutions specifically dealing with the spread of disinformation.
