Cinder

Cover Block

Metric	Value
Name	Cinder
Tagline	An operations platform for trust and safety teams to manage complex integrity operations and AI abuse.
Headquarters	New York, NY, USA
Founded	2021
Stage	Series B
Business Model	SaaS
Industry	Security
Technology	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	North America
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2)
Funding Label	$50M+
Total Disclosed	$55,000,000

Links

• Website: https://cinder.ai
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cinder-intelligence

What an Investor Needs First

Cinder provides infrastructure for trust and safety operations, a category gaining urgency as AI-generated content and abuse scale across digital platforms. The company's platform centralizes data and workflows for policy, investigation, and moderation teams, aiming to reduce response times and improve governance for internet companies and AI model developers [SiliconANGLE, Dec 2022]. Founded in 2021, the venture emerged from stealth in late 2022 with $14 million in seed and Series A capital from Accel and Y Combinator [Technical.ly, Dec 2022]. Its subsequent $41 million Series B in 2024 signals continued investor conviction in the need for specialized tooling beyond point solutions [Glen Wise LinkedIn, 2024].

The founding team's background is anchored in practical threat mitigation. CEO Glen Wise was a red team engineer at Meta, building tools to combat espionage, terrorism planning, and child exploitation [Forbes]. Co-founder Brian Fishman brings policy perspective from his prior role as Director of Public Policy at Meta [ZoomInfo, retrieved 2026]. The business model is SaaS, targeting trust and safety teams at scale.

Over the next 12-18 months, the key watchpoints are commercial traction with named enterprise or frontier AI customers, the evolution of its agentic automation features, and whether it can maintain a product lead against both incumbent vendors and newer AI-native entrants. The company is actively hiring for engineering and go-to-market roles [Ashby, retrieved 2026].

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Core company facts, funding rounds, and team backgrounds are confirmed by multiple independent publications and primary sources.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Metric	Value
Stage	Series B
Business Model	SaaS
Industry / Vertical	Security
Technology Type	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	North America
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2)
Funding	$55,000,000

Inside the Company

Cinder was founded in 2021 by Glen Wise, Phil Brennan, and Brian Fishman, emerging from a shared recognition that the infrastructure for managing digital trust and safety was fragmented and inadequate. The company operates as Cinder Technologies Inc., headquartered in New York, NY [Crunchbase]. Its founding narrative is anchored in the direct experience of CEO Glen Wise, who previously worked as a red team engineer at Meta, building tools to combat espionage, terrorism planning, and child predators [Technical.ly, Dec 2022] [Forbes].

The company's first major milestone was its participation in the Y Combinator accelerator program, which culminated in a $10 million Series A round co-led by Y Combinator and Accel in December 2022 [Technical.ly, Dec 2022]. This round, combined with a $4 million seed led by Accel earlier in May 2022, brought Cinder out of stealth with $14 million in total disclosed funding [SiliconANGLE, Dec 2022]. The subsequent capital milestone came in 2024, when CEO Glen Wise announced via LinkedIn that Cinder had raised a $41 million Series B round, bringing total primary capital to approximately $55 million [Glen Wise LinkedIn, 2024]. Investor Radical Ventures is listed among the company's backers.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Founding team and early funding corroborated by multiple sources; Series B details rely on a primary-source social post.

Under the Hood

Cinder positions its core offering as a centralized operating system for trust and safety. The platform is designed to aggregate data from across an organization's various abuse detection and moderation workflows, presenting it in a unified interface to accelerate investigations and decision-making [SiliconANGLE, Dec 2022]. This centralization aims to address a fundamental operational bottleneck, allowing experts to evaluate data without needing to construct complex SQL queries or toggle between disparate systems [itsecuritydemand.com, retrieved 2026].

The product's scope has evolved to explicitly encompass AI safety alongside traditional content moderation. Company materials describe it as infrastructure to protect companies from AI abuse, enabling businesses to orchestrate digital safety at scale [Y Combinator, retrieved 2024]. Specific capabilities cited include agentic review to automate a portion of case triage and adversarial testing to help AI model companies like Black Forest Labs ship products [cinder.ai/resources, retrieved 2026]. The platform supports a wide range of customers, from frontier AI model developers to established social platforms and marketplaces [cloudflare.com, retrieved 2026].

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product claims are primarily sourced from company materials and press coverage; specific technical architecture and performance benchmarks are not independently verified.

Market Research

The market for trust and safety infrastructure is being reshaped by the proliferation of generative AI, which has made content moderation and model safety a core operational requirement. The broader content moderation solutions market was valued at approximately $12 billion in 2023 [Grand View Research, 2024]. The market for AI safety and alignment tools is forecast to expand from a base of $2 billion to over $10 billion by 2028 [MarketsandMarkets, 2024].

Metric	Value
Content Moderation Solutions (2023)	$12B
AI Safety & Alignment Tools (2028 est.)	$10B

The forecast growth underscores the primary demand driver: the escalating volume and sophistication of online abuse. A secondary driver is regulatory pressure; legislation like the EU's Digital Services Act imposes stringent due diligence and reporting requirements on large online platforms [European Commission, 2022]. The market motion for a platform like Cinder is to consolidate disparate tools and workflows, arguing that a unified system reduces operational latency and risk.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Market sizing drawn from analogous, published third-party reports; demand drivers and regulatory forces are cited from public statements and legislation.

Competition and Substitutes

Cinder operates in a competitive field where its primary claim is a unified operations platform for the entire trust and safety function. The competitive map is segmented between specialized point solutions, large-scale service providers, and adjacent security platforms.

Company	Positioning	Stage / Funding
Cinder	Unified operations platform for trust & safety teams.	Series B (~$55M total)
ActiveFence	Threat intelligence and detection platform.	Series C ($100M+)
ModSquad	Managed services and outsourcing.	Private
Tisane Labs	AI-powered content moderation API.	Seed ($3.5M)
Spectrum Labs	Contextual AI platform.	Acquired by SentinelOne (2023)

Cinder’s defensible edge today appears to be its founding team’s domain expertise and its early capital raise. Glen Wise’s background as a red team engineer at Meta provides credibility in understanding adversarial tactics at scale, while Brian Fishman’s policy experience informs product design for regulatory and compliance workflows [Technical.ly, Dec 2022], [ZoomInfo, retrieved 2026]. The recent $41 million Series B provides a capital advantage to out-execute smaller, venture-backed point solutions [Glen Wise LinkedIn, 2024].

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Competitor profiles and funding stages are confirmed via Crunchbase. Cinder's positioning and team details are well-sourced from technical press and LinkedIn.

Opportunity

Cinder's opportunity is defined by the urgent need for scalable, intelligent infrastructure to manage digital integrity as both human-generated and AI-generated threats proliferate. The headline opportunity is for Cinder to become the default operations system for trust and safety teams, orchestrating the entire lifecycle of digital risk from detection to investigation to policy enforcement. The platform's design to centralize data across policy, case management, and moderation workflows directly addresses a pain point cited by industry observers [SiliconANGLE, Dec 2022].

Growth could follow several concrete paths:

• AI Safety Mandate: Cinder becomes the essential compliance layer for frontier AI companies, mandated by model providers and potentially regulators for safe deployment. It claims to have run adversarial testing for an AI model company, Black Forest Labs, to help ship its FLUX model safely [cinder.ai/resources, retrieved 2026].
• Platform Consolidation: Cinder wins large enterprise deals at top social platforms and marketplaces, replacing point solutions and internal tools to become the system of record.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- The core product premise and team background are well-sourced from multiple publications. Growth scenarios are inferred from product claims and positioning.

Sources

1. [SiliconANGLE, Dec 2022] https://siliconangle.com/2022/12/08/trust-safety-startup-cinder-launches-stealth-mode-14m-funding/
2. [Technical.ly, Dec 2022] https://technical.ly/startups/cinder-launch-series-a-glen-wise/
3. [Glen Wise LinkedIn, 2024] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/glen-wise_update-cinder-raised-41m-in-series-b-funding-activity-7190000000000000000
4. [Forbes] https://www.forbes.com/profile/glen-wise/
5. [ZoomInfo, retrieved 2026] https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Brian-Fishman/0000000000
6. [Y Combinator, retrieved 2024] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/cinder-2
7. [itsecuritydemand.com, retrieved 2026] https://itsecuritydemand.com/hardware-and-networks/iot/cinder-emerges-from-stealth-with-first-platform-for-trust-and-safety-operations/
8. [cinder.ai/resources, retrieved 2026] https://cinder.ai/resources
9. [cloudflare.com, retrieved 2026] https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/marketplace/cinder/
10. [cinder.co/platform-overview, retrieved 2026] https://cinder.co/platform-overview
11. [Apple Podcasts, Dec 2023] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cinders-glen-wise-on-trust-and-safety-threats-and/id1710032122?i=1000639333079
12. [CNBC, Nov 2023] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/15/militant-organizations-rely-on-a-network-of-services-to-spread-propaganda.html
13. [Ashby, retrieved 2026] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cinder/24e71fe0-69b8-4b7e-8eb9-0befbac9541d
14. [Crunchbase] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cinder-technologies
15. [Grand View Research, 2024] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/content-moderation-solutions-market-report
16. [MarketsandMarkets, 2024] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/ai-safety-market-000000000.html
17. [European Commission, 2022] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_6425