Rob Leathern has spent the better part of a decade watching fraudsters evolve. At Meta, where he led business integrity efforts, and later at Google overseeing product privacy and security, the scale of the problem became impossible to ignore. Now he's building a company around a deceptively simple wager: that platforms will pay for an answer in less time than it takes to blink.
InfoHawk, the Austin startup Leathern co-founded with former Meta and Google colleagues, said it has raised $2.25 million in pre-seed funding—a round announced on June 8, 2026, and led by Moonshots Capital. The investor roster reads like a who's-who of platform enforcement veterans: Jon Leibowitz, who served two terms as FTC Chair; Rob Goldman, Meta's former head of ads; Brian O'Kelley, who founded ad tech giant AppNexus. Also in the mix are Scott Spencer, Google's former VP of ads safety and privacy, and Nikila Srinivasan, a product lead at WhatsApp and Meta.
That pedigree matters in a market where credibility often counts as much as code.
The pitch: Fraud verdicts, delivered instantly
InfoHawk sells a real-time API that scores URLs, accounts, and transactions for fraud risk in under 300 milliseconds. The use cases are familiar to anyone running a platform: sign-up flows, payment checkouts, ad clicks—anywhere a split-second decision can stop a bad actor before damage spreads.
The product ingests a range of inputs—text, images, video, domain names, IP addresses, phone numbers, social identifiers—and returns what the company calls an "explainable verdict" through a REST API or MCP server. There's also a no-code workspace called Agent Investigator for analysts who prefer clicking to coding, though the core pitch is programmatic integration. Beta access is currently available through a waitlist.
It's an API-first bet in a space that's historically relied on manual review queues and legacy rule engines. Whether that approach can carve out defensible ground is the open question.
A problem that won't quit growing
The numbers Leathern and his team cite are staggering, if not exactly new. A 2025 report from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance found scam losses reached $442 billion across 42 countries. Counterfeit trade totaled $467 billion in 2021, according to data published in 2025 by the OECD and EUIPO. Business email compromise attacks—those increasingly sophisticated phishing schemes targeting finance departments—are projected to grow at 22.4% annually from 2024 through 2030, per Grand View Research.
InfoHawk's co-founders watched these tallies climb from the inside. James McCrindle spent four years at Meta hunting fake and compromised accounts across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Ben Poiesz directed privacy engineering at Google before leading security infrastructure at Grammarly. They know the signals fraudsters leave behind, and perhaps more importantly, they know how quickly those signals can shift.
"The fraud supply chain is becoming as sophisticated as the platforms trying to stop it," Moonshots Capital wrote in a blog post explaining the investment thesis. The firm framed the bet around "mapping" that supply chain—understanding not just individual bad actors but the networks and infrastructure that support them.
Timing into a hot (and crowded) category
InfoHawk joins a wave of well-funded startups racing to build better fraud defenses. Memcyco raised $37 million in January for anti-impersonation technology. Outtake closed $40 million the same month for what it calls AI deception defenses. Even JPMorgan got into the game, committing roughly $14 million to anti-scam projects in May.
The company was founded this year and lists 2–10 employees on LinkedIn, though such data can lag behind actual headcount. The fresh capital will fund platform development and beta partnerships—standard early-stage priorities, though the competitive landscape suggests InfoHawk will need to move faster than most.
Incumbents are adding AI capabilities. New entrants are chasing the same fraud signals. The question isn't whether fraud detection matters—clearly it does—but whether sub-300-millisecond response times and a developer-friendly API are enough to win deals when platforms have dozens of options.
Leathern's answer, for now, seems to be that the team's combined years inside Meta and Google count for something. They've seen what works at scale, and what doesn't. Whether that institutional knowledge translates into a platform customers will trust—and pay for—remains the test ahead.
The fraud problem isn't going anywhere. InfoHawk is betting it can deliver answers before it does any more damage.
