Today we're announcing Azonic's pre-seed round, backed by Blackbird and Antler alongside Jamie Beaton, founder and CEO of Crimson Education; Eliot Crowther, co-founder of Pushpay; and Jovan Pavlicevic, founder of Emerge. Azonic is a unified intelligence platform for law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigating online crime: one system for the reports, case files and intelligence that today sit in separate places, with a virtual analyst working alongside every investigator. Investigators from New Zealand, Australia and the US are already working with the platform today.
We come to this from inside the fight. Co-founder and CEO Caden Scott founded the International Online Crime Coordination Center (IOC3), the non-profit that connects law enforcement agencies and the world's largest online platforms against online crime. Co-founder and CTO Thomas Holdom has spent years building AI systems for large, regulated organisations. We're also introducing our advisory board: Michael Hurley, formerly of the CIA and Palantir, where he was a senior adviser to CEO Alex Karp, and Brad Brekke, founding director of the FBI's Office of the Private Sector.
"Online crime is scaling faster than the systems built to investigate it, and Azonic is tackling that gap with technology designed specifically for the realities of investigative work. Caden brings rare firsthand exposure to the problem through his work building IOC3, while Thomas brings deep experience building AI systems for complex organisations. Together, they're a potent combination of industry expertise and technical capability needed to take on a problem of this scale, and we're excited to back them" said James Palmer, Blackbird.
Azonic was started because the fastest-growing criminal networks in the world have no headquarters to raid and no hierarchy to dismantle. They run on the platforms millions of us use every day, organising child sexual exploitation, sextortion, fraud and violent extremism across dozens of countries at once. When one account falls, three more appear, and reports of these crimes reaching agencies have multiplied year after year. Behind each one is a person, too often a child. In front of each one is an investigator working to reach them in time.
Justice is slower by design. It demands care, rigour and proof that holds up in court. Offending is now automated, distributed and effectively industrial, while the work of proving it remains handmade. The mathematics of the fight have changed, and the people protecting children and communities deserve a way of working built for the new mathematics. The mission is simple to state and hard to do: help them move at the speed and scale of the crime they face.
"In my former role with the FBI I observed first hand the speed and scale of threats emerging from the cyber world. I also saw the limitations of traditional methods to identify and track those threats. When I was introduced to Azonic and saw what Caden and Thomas had developed, I was impressed by their innovative platform and their personal commitment to assisting law enforcement. Azonic provides a new powerful tool for the intelligence community to stay ahead of the threats." said Brad Brekke, founding Director of the FBI's Office of the Private Sector.
The virtual analyst amplifies every investigator standing between offenders and their victims: it runs down leads, connects a case to the ones that came before it, and drafts the outputs that move cases forward, so no report waits unseen. It is built for the teams doing the hardest work there is: child protection units, counter-extremism teams, and the investigators tracking offending that crosses every border it meets.
"Azonic's unified intelligence platform will be an essential and invaluable tool to agencies all over the world that investigate online crimes. As such it has tremendous potential for business growth in law enforcement and national security agencies. The United States alone has 19,000 law enforcement agencies. Canada, the UK, and European countries will constitute a large market for Azonic's unique capabilities." said Michael Hurley, former CIA & Palantir.
This is not off-the-shelf AI pointed at policing. On their own, today's AI models do not meet the bar these agencies hold their own people to. Azonic is engineered from the ground up to meet it: a complete intelligence system built for investigative work, of which AI is only one part. Criminal networks have adopted AI with no rules at all. Leveling that field, inside the rules of evidence, is at the core of Azonic.
"We backed Azonic because Caden and Thomas have an earned insight to make a significant difference to the intelligence world. Caden has spent years inside the investigative world these agencies operate in, and Thomas has the AI engineering horsepower to ship the agentic tooling their customers desperately need." - James McClure, Antler.
We are building Azonic with investigators, not just for them: what they tell us shapes what we ship each week.
"I first met Caden as an inquisitive student in Business Navigators. I was blown away when he described his 'side hustle' fighting cyber crime and quickly realised his profound and burning passion for the space. The unicorn creation journey requires relentless obsession and Caden has that. We are delighted to support him," said Jamie Beaton, Crimson Education.
This round funds the next stage of the platform and our work with the agencies on the front line of online crime.
Crime scales without limits. Investigators do not. Azonic solves that.
Azonic is a unified intelligence platform for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand. Agencies can request access at azonic.ai. Media enquiries: press@azonic.ai.