The pitch deck practically writes itself: take the most universally despised corporate ritual—annual security awareness training—and make it vanish. Or at least make it stop feeling quite so much like penance.
That's the bet San Francisco's Herd Security is making, though the company's co-founder and CEO Brandon Min wouldn't put it quite that way. On May 6, 2026, Herd announced a $3 million seed round led by Aspiron Ventures, with Team Ignite, ForwardSlash VC, Forum Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and YPO all chipping in. The money, Min says, will fund an expansion beyond cybersecurity into HR and AI training, fine-tune the platform's AI-generated video capabilities, and build out partnerships.
What Herd is really selling, though, is relief from what nearly every office worker recognizes: the hour-long compliance video, the external login to some clunky platform you'll use once a year, the checkbox exercise that teaches you almost nothing about actual threats.
Training That Arrives, Rather Than Waits
Herd's approach flips the script. Instead of pulling employees out of Slack or Microsoft Teams to complete modules, it pushes what it calls "microlessons"—60-second, single-concept bursts delivered as native Slack messages or Teams adaptive cards. Inline responses, completion tracking, no app downloads required.
The company claims engagement rates north of 90 percent—though there's no third-party verification of those numbers yet. Still, customers are materializing. Onebrief Inc., a defense tech company, made the switch, with its Director of Corporate IT & Security describing a move to "microtrainings delivered directly in workflows" in Herd's funding announcement.
Min, who spent time at Duo Security, Cisco, and Panther Labs before co-founding Herd, frames it as a shift from episodic compliance to continuous education. "Wave goodbye to KnowBe4," the company's homepage declares—a pointed jab at the industry incumbent, though one rooted in competitive positioning rather than independent assessment. KnowBe4 does offer Slack and Teams integrations, to be fair. But those aren't the company's primary delivery mechanism, which is precisely Herd's opening.
Three Ways to Learn, All AI-Assisted
The platform comes in three flavors, all powered by generative AI. The microlessons show up in channels as brief, interactive messages. The conversational AI module takes a different path: adaptive dialogue that pulls from a company's actual security policies, citing specific sections and adjusting in real time based on responses.
Then there's the AI video training—narrated clips generated from prompts or uploaded policy documents. Herd markets both short-form videos "optimized for Slack/Teams" and longer content, leaning heavily on AI-driven scripting and voiceover.
Under the hood, Herd relies on OpenAI for inference. The company's September 15, 2025 terms of service are explicit: no message content gets ingested for training purposes. There's also SCORM export for organizations still tethered to learning management systems, though that feature only unlocks at the Growth tier and above.
Pricing starts at $250 monthly for startups with 25 or fewer employees (application required). The Base plan runs $600 per month for unlimited employees, three creator seats, and one destination. Growth doubles that to $1,200, adding unlimited destinations—Slack, Teams, and web simultaneously. Enterprise is custom pricing, which is where conversational AI training, behavior analytics, and cross-channel phishing simulations (email, SMS, and what Herd calls "deepfakes") live.
A Familiar Dance, Different Steps
Herd isn't alone in trying to colonize Slack and Teams. KnowBe4's SecurityCoach is there. So is Hoxhunt's platform, Living Security's nudges, and Haekka's microlearning modules. The difference, Herd argues, isn't just integration—it's primacy. The product was built for those channels first, not retrofitted from a traditional LMS.
The company is also leaning into newer threats, particularly AI-driven social engineering. Min and co-founder Grant Joy—CTO, previously at Panther Labs and Imperva—won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2025 with a demo focused on deepfake and vishing risk training. A June 2025 podcast appearance hammered home the same positioning.
The seed money will help expand content beyond cybersecurity, though details on HR and AI training remain somewhat sketchy in the May announcements. Herd has assembled a respectable advisor roster: former runZero CEO Chris Kirsch, Vanta co-founder Erik Goldman, and several CISOs and investors. In a market where trust rivals technology, those names carry weight.
The Open Question
Whether Slack-native delivery can genuinely displace the entrenched platforms—KnowBe4 went public in 2021 and claims millions of users—remains uncertain. The incumbents aren't standing still, and compliance requirements often favor established vendors with long audit trails.
But Min's bet is simpler than that. If the office has moved to chat, maybe the training should too. Not as an add-on, but as the default. It's a straightforward enough thesis, one that hinges less on revolutionary technology than on a basic insight: people are more likely to engage with things that meet them where they already are.
Sometimes the innovation isn't inventing something new. It's just showing up in the right place at the right time, with the right message. Literally.
