Vow founder Soroush Pour raises $US3m for AI hacking helper Harmony Intelligence

A Sydney start-up that uses AI to act as ethical hacker so companies can be protected has just raised about $4.7m as its founder looks to tackle our greatest threats.

Harmony Intelligence's team (from left) Soroush Pour, Alex Browne, Chris Mathwin, Collin Gray and James Dao, is using artificial intelligence to fight AI-powered cyber attacks.

Fake meat and artificial intelligence-powered cyber attacks might not appear to have much in common. But there are plenty of parallels, according to tech entrepreneur Soroush Pour.

Mr Pour’s key interest is how technology can be used to solve the most crucial problems facing humanity.

This led him to lab grown meat start-up Vow, and more recently founding his own cyber security software company, Harmony Intelligence, with former colleague Alex Browne.

“Six, seven years ago, climate change and sustainability was where I thought the biggest impacts would be – and I still obviously think it’s a big problem worth working on,” Mr Pour said about his foray into fake meat.

Alex Browne, co-founder of Harmony Intelligence.

“But I’ve been following AI for quite a while now, since about 2014, and I think it reached a bit of an inflection point where you could kind of see the writing on the wall and just how quickly it was going to evolve and take over a lot of the economy and the world.

“I realised that this was coming really fast and we’re really not ready for it, hence starting work on this and eventually starting Harmony.”

Mr Pour has just completed a $US3m ($4.76m) raising, which AirTree Ventures led with participation from more than 30 strategic investors, including Adept AI, First Row Partners, Maxwell Capital, Eric Ries – author of the bestseller The Lean Startup.

Harmony – which is now valued at more than $10m – uses AI to effectively perform the role of an ethical hacker. It can run constantly in the background, identifying vulnerabilities, so a company can deploy a remedy and prevent an actual cyber attack.

Such technology is crucial as criminals harness AI to stage attacks and target security gaps faster than IT teams can patch them.

“What we’re working on most closely is systems being hacked by AI systems that have become as good as the world’s best cyber attackers,” said Mr Pour, who is based in Sydney.

“So what would have historically taken hours, or days, or weeks for a human cyber security researcher to do could happen in minutes with these systems, and you can have them running continuously. So if you made a change and accidentally opened a new hole in your system, that’s found within minutes.”

Harmony Intelligence co-founder Soroush Pour appears before a Senate Committee into AI adoption.

Mr Soroush appeared for a Senate Committee on Adopting AI last year and warned that “humanity already faces AI-powered threats”. These span election integrity, cyber attacks and bioterrorism.

Last month criminals used a AI ‘deep fake’ to fleece UK engineering firm Arup of $US25m, by tricking an employee to perform what appeared to be a routine transfer.

“The case is an example of the type of attacks that are happening,” Mr Pour said.

“Increasingly, the world is going to need to make faster and faster decisions and faster and faster changes in the threat landscape, in terms of risks, but also just more generally, across the economy and geopolitics.

“We’re going to need a lot of new tools and institutions, and we’re really focused on that, with cybersecurity as the first part of that important problem we’re trying to solve.”

(from left) Harmony Intelligence Chris Mathwin, James Dao, Airtree's Jax Vullinghs, and co-founder Soroush Pour.

Mr Pour and his fellow co-founder at Harmony Alex Browne plan to deploy the $US3m to scale up the business and release the product into the market in the next six months.

“There is still a lot of R & D to do but we’re already working with some early customers. We’re at the design partner stage.”

Airtree Ventures partner Jax Vullinghs said: “We’re seeing an arms race developing in AI security”.

“As AI systems become more powerful and accessible, the tools available to malicious actors are evolving at an unprecedented rate. Harmony’s team combines deep AI and cyber expertise, making them exactly the kind of company we want to back.”

Adept AI chief executive Zach Brock said traditional cyber security approaches “simply cannot keep pace with AI-augmented threats” at Harmony’s platform was timely.

“Their automated penetration testing platform is a great example of the kind of innovation we need — using AI’s strengths to help bolster cybersecurity and close the offence-defence gap,” Mr Brock said.

Originally published as Vow founder Soroush Pour raises $US3m for AI hacking helper Harmony Intelligence