Asymmetric Security Raises £3m Pre-Seed Led by Susa Ventures to Accelerate AI Cyber Forensics

January 23, 2026

Asymmetric Security, the AI-native digital forensics and incident response startup, has raised £3 million ($4.2 million) in an oversubscribed pre-seed round. The investment was led by Susa Ventures, with participation from Halcyon Ventures, Overlook Ventures, and a group of angel investors including Meta's Charlie Songhurst, Entrepreneur First co-founder Matt Clifford, and former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston. The company was founded in 2025 by Alexis Carlier, Zainab Ali Majid, and Pippa Thompson and has offices in London and San Francisco.

Business Email Compromise remains among the most costly categories of cybercrime globally. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reports that BEC-related incidents account for 73% of all reported cyber events, with cumulative losses exceeding $55 billion over the past decade. Yet most security operations centres lack the analytical capacity to investigate the majority of alerts in depth, meaning many attacks are reviewed only at a surface level or go undetected entirely. Traditional digital forensics and incident response engagements are slow and expensive, often requiring 40 or more hours of manual review across thousands of emails and logs for a single investigation.

Asymmetric's platform pairs frontier AI models with senior cybersecurity experts drawn from CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, RAND, Stroz Friedberg, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge. The system autonomously collects artefacts across email, identity, and cloud applications, reconstructs the attack timeline, generates recommendations, and delivers structured findings to responders—compressing what previously took days into a matter of hours. The company has already accelerated responses across hundreds of attacks and plans to extend its service to cover insider threats, ransomware, and nation-state incidents over the coming year.

A distinctive aspect of Asymmetric's approach is that its operational caseload directly informs its AI development. By drawing on real incidents, the team builds evaluations and benchmarks that advance both its own cyber-defence capabilities and those of frontier AI labs—a feedback loop that grows more valuable as the volume and complexity of AI-driven attacks increases.

The funding will be deployed to expand engineering and incident response headcount. Susa Ventures partner Chad Byers framed the investment around the full-stack AI services thesis: a cybersecurity services business that is compelling in its own right, while also providing a distribution channel into the broader enterprise security market.

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