AI is giving cybercrime a makeover, and this startup just raised $15 million to fight back
Fortune Allie Garfinkle
AI has made cybercrime faster, cheaper, and harder to separate from fraud. Overwatch just raised $15 million to help companies defend against that mess.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Allie Garfinkle — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
The big shift in cybercrime isn’t some distant future with rogue AI agents. It’s already here, and Arjun Bisen says most people still underestimate how much damage it can do. Bisen, who once helped shape Australia’s cyber engagement strategy in the 2010s, now runs Overwatch, a digital threat detection startup built around the idea that cyberattacks, fraud, and financial crime now bleed into each other.
That overlap matters because the old boxes no longer hold. Attackers are using AI to speed up scams, impersonation, and automated attacks, while also making the money trail harder to separate from the breach itself. Bisen says the industry’s habit of treating cybersecurity, fraud, and money laundering as distinct problems has fallen apart.
Overwatch was founded in 2022 by Bisen and Zara Perumal. The New York-based company uses technology including AI agents to help customers defend at scale, and it just raised a $15 million Series A led by Mouro Capital. Visa Ventures and Capital One Ventures joined the round, along with PruVen Capital, New Era Capital Partners, and Y Combinator.
The customer list hints at who is paying attention. Visa, Capital One, Cash App, SoFi, Stripe, and DoorDash are all using Overwatch, which suggests the company is selling into businesses that live close to payments and account abuse. Bisen says the economics of abuse have changed too: Mastercard, he said, put the cost of an attack at less than $3, which makes scams look less like a specialist skill and more like something anyone can spray and pray.
He has examples. One threat actor, he said, ran more than 100 attack campaigns in about five days, compromised 27 payment sites, and captured card details for more than 600,000 cards. He also describes fake businesses that look legitimate until the trail turns toward gambling and illegal cash movement. In that world, even the software stack starts to look familiar — just pointed at the wrong side of the economy.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The real story here isn’t that AI is helping criminals; it’s that cybercrime has become a normal software business, complete with tooling, scale, and customers. That’s a grim little upgrade, and pretending fraud, money laundering, and hacking are separate departments is how defenders keep losing. The market is finally being forced to act like the attackers already do: all one nasty system.
Read more about this at: Fortune