What Cinder Technologies does

Cinder Technologies is a venture-backed software company founded in 2022 that builds an AI-native trust and safety operations platform for large internet platforms and AI companies. Headquartered in New York City, it serves foundation model labs, generative AI companies, and consumer platforms; publicly named customers include OpenAI, Spotify, Depop, Black Forest Labs, Character.AI, Synthesia, Zello, Wizz, Patreon, BeReal, Stability AI, Midjourney, and ElevenLabs. The founders include former operators from the US government (CIA), Meta's Trust & Safety and Threat Discovery teams, and Palantir, giving the company a domain pedigree in counterterrorism, child-exploitation prevention, and nation-state threat response that few competitors or in-house teams can replicate.

The core product, the Cinder Platform, is a unified system of record that combines a flexible schema-driven data model, policy management, case workflows, an AI Agent Platform (content moderation, case investigation, IP/copyright, user fraud/ATO, and custom agents), human review, quality assurance, audit/compliance, and analytics. Cinder Agents are policy-trained and multimodal (text, image, audio, video, live stream) with sub-500ms latency, are trained on each customer's own validated human decisions, and improve continuously through closed-loop retraining. The platform integrates with NCMEC, IWF, StopNCII, Salesforce, and OpenAI's content moderation API, supports 100+ languages, and holds SOC2, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance. Cinder also offers expert services, including red teaming and adversarial testing, data labeling, managed BPO/moderation operations, and a Know Your Applicant (KYA) workflow for hiring-fraud detection.

Cinder sells primarily through direct enterprise sales gated by a demo form, with pricing not publicly disclosed. Revenue streams include enterprise platform subscriptions (multi-year contracts), outcome-based managed BPO services, project-based red teaming engagements, and data labeling and KYA services. The company has raised $55M in disclosed funding across a $4M Accel-led seed (2022), a $10M Accel-led Series A (2022), and a $41M Series B led by Radical Ventures (May 2026); it is currently sub-30 employees with stated plans to double headcount over the next 12 months. Financial revenue figures are not disclosed.

Name

Cinder Technologies

Legal name

Cinder

Website

https://cinder.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2022

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Cinder Technologies is an AI-native trust and safety platform that helps large internet platforms and AI companies automate content moderation, fraud detection, and policy enforcement across multimodal content at scale.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Trust and Safety Operations Platform

NAICS

Computer Systems Design and Related Services (5415)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming Services (7371), Services-Computer Processing & Data Preparation (7374)

akta.pro primary industry

Trust, Safety & Risk Support (Fraud, Abuse, Policy Enforcement) (BPAAABAI)

akta.pro secondary industry

Safety, Alignment & Content Moderation (Guardrails, Red Teaming) (HDAAACAI)

Keywords

• Trust and safety platform
• AI content moderation
• Policy enforcement software
• Fraud detection platform
• AI safety infrastructure

Headquarters

HQ city

New York

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Infrastructure, Supply Chain

Revenue model

1. Cinder Platform subscription: Core platform access (policies, workflows, AI agents, human review, QA, audit/compliance, integrations) sold as an enterprise SaaS subscription to foundation model labs, generative AI companies, marketplaces, social/dating, gaming/streaming, and creator-economy platforms. Customer count and per-seat metrics are not publicly disclosed.
2. Managed BPO / outcome-based moderation services: Cinder can act as the customer's BPO for moderation operations, priced on outcomes rather than headcount or hours. BPO transition planning, workforce design, operations optimization, and managed moderation are part of this stream.
3. AI red teaming and adversarial testing engagements: Project-based adversarial testing engagements covering pre-launch model evaluation, prompt-injection and jailbreak testing, and system-prompt governance. Engagements are scoped to outcomes and staffed with senior operators.
4. Data labeling and custom expert services: Data labeling, custom investigations, policy design, crisis response, and threat intelligence engagements, often delivered as a service alongside the platform. Used by customers such as Patreon for QA-grade labeling.
5. Know Your Applicant (KYA) add-on: ATS-integrated applicant fraud detection and screening as a specialized service offering, leveraging Cinder's existing trust-and-safety stack for identity and credential review.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels8 records

Core offering

Cinder provides an AI-native platform that turns customer-defined trust and safety policies into agentic workflows. The system combines policy management, configurable AI agents (content moderation, case investigation, IP/copyright, user fraud/ATO, and custom), human review, quality assurance, audit trails, and integrations with third-party tools (IWF, NCMEC, StopNCII, Salesforce, OpenAI's content moderation API) into a single operating surface. The platform processes 400M+ events daily, automates 94% of human review, and is delivered as enterprise SaaS plus optional managed BPO, red teaming, data labeling, and Know Your Applicant services.

Product overview

Cinder Technologies offers a unified AI-native trust and safety platform that combines a central system of record (the Cinder Platform) with an AI Agent Platform (Cinder Agents) and a set of expert services. The Cinder Platform centralizes policies, workflows, case management, human review, quality assurance, audits, and analytics. The AI Agent Platform deploys policy-trained agents across five modules: the Content Moderation Agent, Case Investigation Agent, IP and Copyright Agent, User Fraud and ATO Agent, and Custom Agents. Complementing the platform and agents, Cinder offers services for Red Teaming + Adversarial Testing, Data Labeling, BPO Transition + Moderation, and Know Your Applicant (KYA) fraud detection. Together, the platform, agents, and services deliver a single operating surface for trust and safety teams to detect, enforce, and audit decisions at scale, with integrations to IWF, Salesforce, StopNCII, NCMEC, and OpenAI's content moderation API. Customers include OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Character.AI, Synthesia, Zello, BeReal, Depop, ElevenLabs, Midjourney, Stability AI, Spotify, Wizz, and Patreon.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Cinder Platform System of record for trust and safety operations, centralizing policies, workflows, agents, human review, audits, and analytics. Designed for enterprise trust and safety teams that need policy management, casework, auditability, role-based permissions, SSO, and SCIM support in a single operating surface.
• Cinder Agents (AI Agent Platform) AI agent platform that deploys policy-trained agents for content moderation, case investigation, IP/copyright, user fraud/ATO, and custom problems. Agents are continuously retrained via human-in-the-loop review, with sub-500ms latency and explainable decisions including confidence scores. Customers can also bring their own agents.
• Red Teaming and Adversarial Testing Expert-run adversarial testing service covering pre-launch model evaluation, prompt injection, jailbreaks, CSAM/NCII/extremism adversarial coverage, and system prompt governance for LLMs, with findings written back to the Cinder platform as policies, workflows, or agent updates.
• Data Labeling AI-ready training data and custom investigation service with real-time evaluation and faster turnaround than legacy labeling shops. Delivered by operators with trust-and-safety backgrounds; also covers custom investigations, policy design, crisis response, and threat intelligence.
• BPO Transition and Moderation Managed moderation operations service covering BPO transition planning, workforce design, capacity modeling, operations optimization, quality programs, tooling rollouts, and managed moderation with outcome-based engagement rather than headcount/hourly contracts.
• Know Your Applicant (KYA) Applicant fraud detection service that identifies risky applicants, synthetic identities, fake credentials, and coordinated abuse in hiring pipelines using identity/liveness verification, VoIP/proxy detection, IP reputation, LinkedIn and GitHub checks, connected directly to customer ATS workflows.

Quantifiable outcome

• 3B+ end-users protected across customer base
• +14 more outcomes

Named customers13 records

Segments7 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration5 records

AI capability15 records

Feature12 records

Partnerships

Nine partnerships are on record, tiered flagship commercial / co-development partner, core technology partner, core ecosystem partner, minor ecosystem partner, core coalition commitment and commercial partnership / co-marketing.

• Synthesiaflagship commercial / co-development partnerStrategic or Co-development PartnerSynthesia extended its trust & safety stack by partnering with Cinder, integrating Cinder agents as a 'second pass' on every model decision. Combined AI + human review reviewed 11.5M+ pieces of content and removed 841,957 in 2025. Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli is a public quote source.
• StopNCIIcore technology partnerTechnology or IntegrationStopNCII and Cinder partner to prevent non-consensual intimate imagery. StopNCII is listed as one of Cinder's third-party integrations.
• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)core technology partnerTechnology or IntegrationCinder built a NCMEC integration that streamlines the reporting process for CSAM; NCMEC is also referenced as a third-party integration Cinder supports.
• Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)core technology partnerTechnology or IntegrationListed among Cinder's third-party integrations alongside NCMEC, Salesforce, and StopNCII.
• OpenAIcore technology partnerTechnology or IntegrationOpenAI's content moderation API is integrated into the Cinder platform ('OpenAI's new content moderation API is now available in Cinder'). OpenAI is also a Cinder customer.
• ROOSTcore ecosystem partnerStrategic or Co-development PartnerCinder partners with ROOST to support open source safety; referenced via the 'Cinder partners with ROOST to support open source safety' blog post on the Resources page.
• Appeals Centre Europeminor ecosystem partnerStrategic or Co-development PartnerCinder announced a partnership with the Appeals Centre Europe (blog post: 'Cinder Is Partnering With The Appeals Centre Europe').
• Christchurch Callcore coalition commitmentOthersCinder has joined the Christchurch Call, a multistakeholder commitment to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.
• Wizz Appcommercial partnership / co-marketingGTM or Marketing PartnerWizz App, trusted by 16 million users, partnered with Cinder to power AI-driven content moderation at scale, with joint announcement on the Cinder blog.

Scale indicators15 records

Recent moves7 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• ActiveFence: ActiveFence is the closest direct competitor to Cinder — an enterprise trust-and-safety platform providing AI-driven content moderation, risk intelligence, and policy enforcement for online platforms. Both compete for the same foundation-model, social, and marketplace customers with overlapping agentic-moderation and red-teaming offerings.
• Hive: Hive offers pre-trained AI moderation APIs for text, image, video, and audio — covering similar policy areas (CSAM, hate speech, violence) as Cinder's Content Moderation Agent. Hive competes head-to-head for the same enterprise customers who want drop-in moderation classifiers, though it lacks Cinder's unified case-management and policy-orchestration layer.
• Checkstep: Checkstep provides AI-powered content moderation, trust-and-safety case management, and compliance tooling to social platforms and marketplaces. It competes directly with Cinder's platform-and-agents model in the European and global social/marketplace segments.
• Spectrum Labs: Spectrum Labs builds AI-based trust-and-safety tooling for online communities, including toxicity detection, moderation automation, and user-safety analytics. It is a direct peer for AI-driven community protection use cases that overlap with Cinder's social, dating, and gaming customer segments.
• Two Hat Security: Two Hat (acquired by Microsoft) historically provided AI content moderation and chat safety for online games, social platforms, and kids' apps. It remains a reference point as a direct competitor in real-time text moderation, although its acquisition by Microsoft shifts it toward incumbent positioning.
• Besedo: Besedo combines AI and human moderation as a managed service for marketplaces, dating, and social platforms — directly competing with Cinder's outcome-based BPO offering and overlapping in counter-AI agent deployments.
• WebPurify: WebPurify offers AI + human content moderation services (including an AI moderation API comparable to Cinder's) for user-generated content platforms. It is a direct peer for both the platform and managed-moderation services Cinder sells.
• Appen: Appen is a major provider of data labeling, annotation, and AI data services — directly comparable to Cinder's Data Labeling service and its role in training moderation models. It competes for the same labeling and QA budgets on enterprise trust-and-safety teams.

Broad incumbents

• Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety: Microsoft ships content moderation and safety tooling through Azure AI Content Safety (built partly on Two Hat) and supports many of the enterprise customers Cinder targets. As a broad incumbent with deep platform distribution, it competes for the same IT and compliance budgets even if it does not match Cinder's per-customer agent customization.

Emerging players

• Sama: Sama provides AI data annotation and content moderation services with a focus on ethical and high-quality human-in-the-loop labeling — comparable to Cinder's Data Labeling and human-review offerings, particularly for foundation-model and generative-AI customers.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

Compliance3 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles4 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds4 records

Investors10 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Cinder Technologies