Fast Facts:
- Company HQ: New York, New York
- Number of Employees: 100+ employees
- Investment: $43m USD, Series A, led by a16z and OpenAI
- Founded: 2024
Our Analysis
Adaptive Security is an AI-powered cybersecurity awareness training (SAT) company that simulates real-world AI-driven attacks, including deepfake video calls, phone calls, phishing emails, and text messages. The New York-based company was founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneurs Brian Long and Andrew Jones, who previously founded TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter) and Attentive, an AI-powered SMS marketing service.
Adaptive Security offers unique phishing simulation capabilities beyond basic email campaigns, including SMS and voice cloning, and supports Google, Microsoft, and other integrations, importing employee data from Rippling and Okta for user personalization. It also offers an AI Content Creator: a customizable, context-based training content library that helps educate employees on spotting social engineering attacks, ensuring no two sessions are alike. The AI Content Creator supports customizable prompts, tone, and branding, with multi-lingual support in 39 languages pulled from Google/Microsoft language tags, and training content is built for desktop and mobile. Admins can measure effectiveness through ongoing reporting, with over 50 built-in reports that make data readable, downloadable, and schedulable as emailed reports.
Though a young company, Adaptive Security is growing rapidly, with hundreds of customers and over $50M in funding from OpenAI’s Startup Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and technology executives.
Adaptive Security’s Approach
Adaptive Security is purpose-built to counter advanced AI-driven threats like deepfake video calls and phishing, targeting mid-to-large enterprises. Unlike legacy SAT solutions focused on generic email phishing and static training, Adaptive Security leverages AI to deliver hyper-personalized, interactive content, realistic simulations, and robust reporting. Integrated with email clients and collaboration tools (e.g., Microsoft Outlook, Slack), it provides a user-friendly dashboard with performance metrics (e.g., click rates, compliance trends) and supports SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance.
The platform supports one-time or trigger-based phishing campaigns, with scheduling for recurring trainings. These campaigns cover vendor impersonation, SMS, business email compromise (BEC), QR code, chat, and deepfake voice phishing simulations. While Adaptive’s innovative, AI-generated content may require human oversight to ensure accuracy, it greatly reduces the time required to create realistic simulations and offers all features in a single commercial package with no add-ons, making it suitable for clients of all sizes.
Let’s now take a deeper look at Adaptive’s key features:
Training Materials
Adaptive Security’s training content includes AI-driven modules built to combat next-generation AI threats. The platform’s expansive content library enables organizations to generate hyper-personalized lessons or craft custom modules from scratch using the AI Content Creator. These bite-sized modules are typically around five minutes long and can be fine-tuned to match any industry’s needs, ensuring relevance and impact. With the AI Content Creator, admins can build tailored courses more efficiently than creating slides/quizzes manually. It also offers interactive modules out of the box and supports community sharing of generated content for broader use.
Adaptive continuously updates the platform’s training content using open-source intelligence (OSINT). Its OSINT spearphishing feature uses LLMs to scrape internet data about your company (e.g., new inbound client, journalist inquiries) for hyper-realistic phishing scenarios. This allows users to stay ahead of emerging and evolving threats like deepfake phishing and AI-powered social engineering. Modules are fully customizable, can be translated into any language, and are adaptable in tone—whether professional for boardroom presentations or engaging for diverse teams.
Engagement is at the core of Adaptive’s approach. It goes beyond static presentations to deliver more immersive, hands-on experiences. For instance, voice phishing modules leverage user microphones to simulate cloned voices, while deepfake video scenarios bring AI threats to life. Interactive training allows users to engage with deepfakes, enhancing learning through practical exposure. This interactive design eliminates the one-size-fits-all approach, empowering employees to recognize and counter sophisticated cyberattacks effectively.
Newsletters and Posters
Adaptive Security provides customizable newsletters and posters to reinforce security awareness, tailored to specific threats like deepfakes using OSINT insights. IT teams can distribute these materials effortlessly across digital or physical channels, enhancing employee engagement, while security teams can use them to consistently align messaging with compliance requirements. This continuous reinforcement is critical for maintaining vigilance in fast-evolving threat environments, supporting enterprise-wide security culture and sustained awareness.
Phishing Simulations
Adaptive is heavily focused on AI-powered risks for their phishing simulation campaigns. The platform’s modules are focused on risks like GenAI-based attacks and AI-powered deepfakes. Simulations are highly realistic and mimic real-world attack methods, such as using cloned voices of employees. The platform supports vendor impersonation, SMS, BEC, QR code, chat, and voice phishing, with AI Personas based on prompts for hyper-realistic scenarios.
The platform provides a module library for crafting highly realistic phishing campaigns that replicate advanced attacker tactics, such as AI-generated deepfake voices or personalized messages. These simulations can be fully customized to align with an organization’s specific needs and risk profile. Analytics identify high-risk employees, enabling targeted training to improve preparedness.
The simulations are powered by OSINT integration, enabling the creation of context-driven, tailored attacks that mirror real-world scenarios. Campaigns can span multiple channels, including email, voice, SMS, and video. Organizations can adjust the tone and complexity, making simulations as professional or colloquial as desired, and even translate content into any language for global teams. IT teams can streamline campaign deployment with prebuilt modules, saving setup time, while security teams can assess resilience against executive deepfakes, which is critical for high-risk sectors like finance.
Adaptive Triage
Adaptive supports user-reported phishing analysis via Adaptive Triage, which streamlines phishing threat management with AI-driven automation.
Triage rapidly analyzes user-reported threats across email, voice, SMS, and video, delivering a precise confidence score for malicious intent in seconds. It provides clear, contextual explanations for each risk score, detailing why a threat is flagged as safe or malicious. Security teams can tailor AI-recommended actions, with reports translatable into any language for global teams, ensuring all members of the SOC gain actionable insights.
The Triage tool maximizes impact by enabling automated, environment-wide responses, such as quarantining threats, moving them to spam, or removing them from all inboxes. This eliminates manual bottlenecks, offering a proactive defense against AI-powered attacks like deepfakes. IT teams reduce operational overhead through automated responses, while security teams gain multilingual SOC insights, vital for rapid threat mitigation in global enterprises.
Phish Alert Button (PAB)
The Phish Alert Button enables users to report suspicious messages directly from their inbox, triggering Adaptive Triage for AI-based analysis. IT teams benefit from simplified user reporting workflows and email client integration, enhancing adoption across distributed workforces, while security teams receive immediate alerts to prioritize threat investigations, allowing them to detect AI-driven threats more quickly. This user-friendly reporting mechanism is critical for early detection of sophisticated attacks, strengthening enterprise defenses by empowering employees to act as the first line of defense.
Dashboards and Analytics
Adaptive includes a comprehensive reporting suite that tracks employee performance against sophisticated phishing simulations. There are over 50 built-in reports available, all of which are downloadable and schedulable as emails to enhance readability and accessibility. Reports are concise, typically taking just minutes to generate, and can be customized to meet specific organizational needs. They’re also clear and precise, ensuring stakeholders from executives to IT teams understand the organization’s security posture.
To drive engagement, Adaptive’s reporting goes beyond static metrics, offering interactive dashboards that highlight trends and individual progress in recognizing threats. For example, employees can see how they performed against a simulated deepfake voice attack, fostering a culture of accountability. This tailored approach ensures phishing reporting is not one-size-fits-all, equipping organizations to strengthen defences effectively. The slick, modern dashboard offers superior customization compared to other SAT providers, enabling IT teams to generate audit-ready reports and security teams to analyze trends for targeted interventions, essential for enterprise compliance.
Adaptive Security’s platform aims to shift security awareness left, enabling employees to counter advanced threats early while supporting security teams with compliance and actionable insights for complex enterprise environments.
The Interface
Strengths
AI-driven customization
Adaptive’s AI Content Creator generates tailored, multilingual training modules using OSINT, designed for enterprises to address specific social engineering risks.
Why it matters: Training content is always highly relevant for your business and targeted for the real-world threats your team is facing. The AI Content Creator’s efficiency and its community-sharing feature allow IT teams to create and share tailored modules quickly, while security teams can ensure compliance with minimal effort.
Realistic phishing simulations
The platform simulates GenAI-based attacks, including deepfake video and voice cloning, targeting finance and healthcare to enhance employee preparedness. We are extremely impressed with the realism of the simulations on offer and how granular the targeting can be.
Why it matters: More realistic simulations mean employees are better equipped to catch and report the real thing. AI Personas and OSINT spearphishing enhance realism, enabling IT teams to deploy targeted campaigns and security teams to strengthen defenses against sophisticated threats.
Interactive training
Adaptive’s modules, typically five-minute sessions, use interactive elements like creating deepfakes of employees to highlight what real-world risks look like.
Why it matters: This is a real benefit when compared with standardized training content, which is often boring for users. Interactive deepfake engagement reduces training time, engaging employees effectively, while enabling security teams to ensure compliance by delivering relevant, hands-on learning.
Compliance and integration
Supports SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance with desktop and mobile access, targeting regulated sectors with distributed workforces.Why it matters: Compliance is a key driver of SAT adoption, and it’s important to note that the AI-generated content offered by Adaptive still meets compliance requirements. Integrations with Google, Microsoft, Rippling, and Okta streamline IT team workflows.
Cautions
You may need to review AI content
Adaptive has strong backing from OpenAI, the market leader in LLM-powered content generation, but security teams may still be cautious about solely relying on AI-generated content for security training. We were impressed by what we’ve seen, but AI-generated content can be unpredictable. As such, AI-generated training materials will require human oversight to ensure accuracy. However, community-shared modules reduce the need for custom generation over time.
Adaptive is a young company
With rapid but recent growth, Adaptive is a classic challenger brand. Companies that adopt early can take advantage of Adaptive’s many benefits, but should be aware this is a young company that will evolve over time. Established SAT providers have larger content libraries, so users may lean on generating custom content, though the platform’s flexibility supports this.
Slim documentation
Adaptive currently offers limited publicly available documentation. This may challenge organizations needing extensive setup or troubleshooting guidance.
Our Verdict
Adaptive fills gaps in the security awareness training space that more established vendors have been slow to address. Many legacy solutions place their focus on simple email-based threats, long lessons with mandatory quizzes, and punishing users who click on simulated phishing links. Adaptive’s slick, modern dashboard and AI-powered training—particularly its deepfake simulation capabilities—position it as a potential market leader over time.
Despite being a newer vendor, Adaptive Security challenges the traditional SAT model by concentrating on complicated or highly targeted attacks, rather than attempting to be a generalist. This platform is still relatively early in its funding and development, but with backing from OpenAI, it has potential to bring major positive disruption to the SAT market. The community-driven content-sharing model enhances module availability, reducing customization burdens for IT teams.
We were impressed by the innovative features, easy-to-use interface, and the quality of the AI-generated simulations and training content. The platform’s superior customization, realistic phishing simulations, and robust reporting make it a compelling choice for enterprises seeking an advanced, AI-driven SAT solution.
Read further
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