A former Meta employee built a $14M-strong trust and safety startup. Meet Cinder

With nearly $14 million in funding in just a year of life, newly launched trust and safety startup Cinder is off to a strong start.

The company just raised a $10 million Series A this month, led by the accelerator Y Combinator and Accel with additional participation from J2 Ventures. Accel also led a $4 million round for the company in May, which brings the company’s total to $14 million.

Cinder was cofounded by CEO Glen Wise, a DC-based technologist and former red team engineer at Meta. Cinder’s platform manages trust and safety operations for client companies; That relevant work covers functions like policy setting, case and investigation management, moderation, reviews, risk monitoring and compliance. The company’s own promotional language notes that Cinder’s platform centralizes data and streamlines investigation workflow data related to abuse in any of those aforementioned operations  — all in the name of reducing fraud, harmful behavior or other internet abuses.

In a blog post announcing the launch of the company, Wise said that he saw the need for a platform to “supercharge” and solely provide internet safety during his time at Meta.

“At Meta, I was on the front lines helping fend off these exponentially increasing threats,” Wise wrote. “My team and I created tools to manage and mitigate risk generated by the most sophisticated abuse scenarios. I learned from not just our successes but also our setbacks. And I realized that nearly every organization faces challenges similar to the ones my team encountered every single day. That realization is why I started Cinder.”

Wise did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to Cinder’s LinkedIn page, the company was technically founded in 2021 and has approximately 13 team members. Alongside Wise, Cinder was developed by COO Phil Brennan, Head of Business Development Brian Fishman and Head of Engineering Declan Cummings; All of these principals formerly worked in trust and safety at Meta, Palantir and government agencies.

With the funds, the company plans to scale up and expand the reach of its product. The Cinder product is already being used at “some of the world’s largest and most innovative organizations,” according to a LinkedIn post

“We aim to empower policymakers, moderators, legal teams and investigators with access to the information, context and support they need to protect their users and their reputation,” Wise continued in his post. “This is our mission at Cinder, and this is just the beginning.”