Pre-seed to cut incident investigations from days to hours via AI agents
This article covers Asymmetric Security, an AI-native cybersecurity and digital forensics startup, raising £3.1m ($4.2m) in a pre-seed funding round to accelerate AI-driven incident investigations. Proceeds will fund engineering and incident response hires and expand the platform to shorten investigation timelines from days to hours, supporting enterprise security teams tackling ransomware, insider threats and nation-state activity.
Asymmetric Security has raised £3.1m ($4.2m) in a pre-seed funding round to speed up cyber incident investigations by applying AI agents to digital forensics and incident response, with the aim of reducing timelines from days to hours. The London and San Francisco-based AI-native cybersecurity and digital forensics startup says the proceeds will fund engineering and incident response hires and broaden its platform to cover ransomware, insider threats and nation-state attacks.
Why it matters
Organisations still rely on slow, manual digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) processes that can take days or weeks to produce actionable findings. Asymmetric Security targets that gap by automating core investigation tasks, which matters as the pace and sophistication of attacks accelerate with AI-driven techniques and the reported losses from threats such as Business Email Compromise run into the tens of billions.
The company reports its platform has been used in over 100 real-world incidents, a sign that automated workflows can already be applied in live environments rather than only in lab tests.
Inside the product
Asymmetric combines automated log collection and parsing with AI-driven investigative analysis, then routes results through expert validation and produces defensive recommendations that security teams can act on. Key capabilities called out by the company include rapid evidence collection, agent-led hypothesis generation, and human-in-the-loop review to reduce false positives and maintain auditability.
The approach is intended to compress the DFIR lifecycle: faster evidence capture and triage shortens time to containment, while automated analysis can reduce reliance on expensive external incident response engagements. The startup plans to extend these capabilities to handle ransomware, insider threat hunting and higher-end adversary activity associated with nation-state actors.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Susa Ventures and included participation from Halcyon Ventures and Overlook Ventures, along with a group of angel investors.
Notable angels named in the announcement were Charlie Songhurst (former Microsoft/Microsoft strategy; associated with Meta in public profiles), Matt Clifford (co-founder of Entrepreneur First, which backs early-stage founders), and Geoff Ralston (former president of Y Combinator). Their involvement brings a mix of product and founder-network experience that can help with business development and talent recruitment as the company scales.
The company described the round as oversubscribed.
In the announcement, Chad Byers, co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, said:
Asymmetric combines elite incident response expertise with frontier AI capabilities. Their services business is compelling in its own right and creates a powerful distribution channel into the broader enterprise security market.
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Founder perspective
The founding team blends AI policy and hands-on forensic experience. Alexis Carlier, CEO and co-founder, previously co-founded the Centre for the Governance of AI and led AI security programmes at RAND and the University of Oxford. Zainab Ali Majid spent more than five years as a cybersecurity analyst at Stroz Friedberg (now part of Aon), investigating major breaches including Cambridge Analytica and publishing peer-reviewed work on AI security evaluations at NeurIPS. Pippa Thompson is listed as a co-founder.
In the announcement, Alexis Carlier, CEO and co-founder at Asymmetric Security, said:
As AI systems become more capable, the security stakes increase dramatically. Autonomous AI-driven attacks are no longer theoretical, and the theft of AI model weights is emerging as one of the most significant security risks facing Western organisations. Our mission is to ensure AI becomes an overwhelming advantage for defenders, not attackers.
The company says the new funding will be used to grow engineering and incident response teams and to productise use cases beyond cloud-first intrusions.
The bigger picture
This raise sits at the intersection of two trends: increased investor interest in applying AI to security tooling, and growing demand from enterprises for faster, more economical incident response. Automating repeatable DFIR tasks can reduce dependency on costly external responders and help internal teams scale.
For the UK and Europe, Asymmetric’s London base and cross-Atlantic presence underline a transatlantic flow of capital and expertise in cyber defence. As AI introduces new attack vectors, startups that marry domain knowledge with machine learning will be watched closely by corporate security teams and investors alike.
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