UK startup Asymmetric bags $4.2M to shrink cyber investigations from days to hours
- ByStartupStory | January 23, 2026
Cyberattacks are becoming harder to track down. Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks account for the majority of reported cyber incidents worldwide, leading to over $55 billion in losses over the last 10 years.
With AI now able to imitate human actions quickly, these attacks are happening faster, costing less, and are tougher to trace. Many companies still use slow, manual methods to investigate, which can take days or weeks.
By the time they figure out what occurred, the damage is often already done. Here’s where Asymmetric Security aims to fix this by combining frontier AI models with human cyber forensics experts. Its platform automates large parts of the investigation process, shrinking response times from days to hours.
To speed up how companies investigate cyberattacks, London and San Francisco-based Asymmetric Security raised $4.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round. The round was led by Susa Ventures, with participation from Halcyon Ventures and Overlook Ventures.
The round also includes angel investors such as Meta’s Charlie Songhurst, Entrepreneur First co-founder Matt Clifford, and former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston.
Building AI for defence, not just offence
Founded by Zainab Ali Majid, Pippa Thompson, and Alexis Carlier, Asymmetric is an AI-native cyber forensics startup that combines elite forensic expertise with secure, advanced automation to deliver rigorous investigations, both proactively hunting threats and responding to incidents.
“As AI progress accelerates toward AGI, the security stakes rise. Autonomous AI attacks are no longer hypothetical, and AI model weight theft is now one of the most consequential security risks facing the West. We exist to accelerate AI cyberdefense and make AI an overwhelming advantage for defenders,” says Alexis Carlier, co-founder of Asymmetric Security.
Asymmetric is using real-world attack data to train and test its own AI defence systems. The goal is to make AI a clear advantage for defenders as attackers increasingly adopt autonomous tools.
The platform has already accelerated responses for 100+ attacks, improving speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency. The platform’s key features include rapid log pulls, AI-powered investigation, human-in-the-loop validation, and defensive recommendations.
What’s next?
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering and incident response teams. Over the next year, the company also plans to widen its services to cover insider threats, ransomware attacks, and nation-state-level incidents.
“We believe in the full-stack AI services thesis. Asymmetric is the best company in the cyber incident response market, with a rare combination of incident response and AI expertise. Their cybersecurity services business is compelling on its own, but it also gives them a powerful distribution channel into the enterprise security market,” said Chad Byers, co-founder and general partner at Susa Ventures.
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