AI is giving cybercrime a makeover, and this startup just raised $15 million to fight back

AI is giving the digital criminal underworld a makeover. 

In fact, though rogue AI agents dominate talk of the future, AI has already changed cybercrime for good, said Arjun Bisen, cofounder and CEO at digital threat detection startup Overwatch. 

“The chaos of today is underappreciated,” said Bisen, a former Australian diplomat who shaped the country’s cyber engagement strategy in the 2010s. “Cybercrime has just become so effective. You see stats that say cybercrime is the third-largest economy in the world after China and the U.S. I don’t know if those numbers are accurate, but there’s some attempt at quantifying it and it does sound scary. I think it’s not fully appreciated by the public.”

Cybercrime—from SMS phishing and ransomware to fake businesses moving real (and illicit) cash—has been with us in all sorts of forms since the earliest days of the internet. But Bisen has been watching as AI has made cybercrime faster, cheaper, and more interconnected. 

“Digital threats is a broad term because it can mean everything from cyberattacks to fraud to financial crime,” said Bisen. “Attackers are using AI to blend all those into one thing. A threat actor doesn’t say: ‘I’m going to do a cybersecurity exploit.’ They say: ‘I’m going to smash and grab, move money away.’ These silos of cybersecurity and money laundering and fraud, the idea that those are separate, that’s disappeared.”

In short, Bisen’s theory is this: As cybercrime increasingly overlaps into a digital threat rat-king, cyberattacks and fraud need to be addressed holistically and together, not in silos. In 2022, Bisen and Zara Perumal cofounded startup Overwatch, which builds and uses technologies (like AI agents) to help companies scale their defense against digital threats. Now, the New York-based company has raised a........

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