InfoHawk, an Austin, Texas startup that builds software to detect online deception, announced a $2.25m pre-seed round on 8 June 2026. Moonshots Capital led the round, according to VC News Daily, which carried the company's announcement. ChainCatcher reported the same amount and lead investor.
The announcement carried an Austin, Texas dateline and did not disclose a valuation, the company's headcount or a breakdown of how the money will be spent. ChainCatcher said only that the funds support InfoHawk's efforts to detect and combat large-scale online threats.
What InfoHawk does
InfoHawk describes itself as the AI platform built to detect and neutralize deception at internet scale. In its summary of the company, ChainCatcher described the product as AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure that helps businesses detect, analyse and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation and deepfake attacks, using AI content recognition and analysis of the infrastructure behind a site.
The announcement itself, as carried by VC News Daily, did not detail the product beyond its one-line description, and the sources opened did not describe pricing, customers or how the system works in more detail.
The founders
VC News Daily named the founders as Rob Leathern, Ben Poiesz and Jamie McCrindle. The announcement did not give their previous employers or titles, and the sources opened for this article did not describe their backgrounds, so none are stated here.
No founding year was given in the sources, and the company did not disclose earlier funding.
Who invested
Alongside Moonshots Capital, the round included angel investors the company described as experienced in building, defending and regulating platforms at scale. They were:
Jon Leibowitz, the former two-term chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; Brian O'Kelley, founder of AppNexus; Rob Goldman, former head of ads at Meta; James Walker, founder and chief executive of Centigrade; Scott Spencer, former vice president of ads safety and privacy at Google; Vlad Fedorov, chief technology officer of GitHub; and Nikila Srinivasan, former vice president of product for WhatsApp. Further angels were not named.
The announcement carried no quotes from the founders or the investors.
What is not known
The sources opened for this article are a republished announcement and one short report, and neither gave customers, revenue, pricing or the size of the team. The company's own website and the original wire release could not be opened.
Both reports agree on the amount, the lead investor, the date and the named angels. Neither gave a founding year, a location beyond the Austin dateline, or the milestones the company intends to reach with the money, and InfoHawk has not said when it expects to raise a seed round. The company's own website could not be opened, and the original wire release was not located, so the account here rests on the republished announcement and one separate report.
Company website: infohawk.com