Breaking
LAUNCH imper.ai emerges from stealth with $28M total funding SERIES A $21.5M led by Redpoint Ventures & Battery Ventures RSAC 2026 Debuts first Workforce Identity Security platform FOUNDERS Three Unit 8200 veterans, HQ in New York MISSION Verify the human behind every workforce interaction LAUNCH imper.ai emerges from stealth with $28M total funding SERIES A $21.5M led by Redpoint Ventures & Battery Ventures RSAC 2026 Debuts first Workforce Identity Security platform FOUNDERS Three Unit 8200 veterans, HQ in New York MISSION Verify the human behind every workforce interaction
Company Profile Cybersecurity Workforce Identity

imper.ai

Verifying the real human behind every workforce interaction - from the first interview to the help-desk password reset.

Founded
2024
HQ
New York
Funding
$28M
Team
~37
imper.ai company logo
imper.ai The wordmark of a New York cybersecurity company - photographed for the record, New York, 2026.
01

The Company Asking a Question Most Breaches Ignore

Nearly every large enterprise breach of the past two years begins the same quiet way - not with a cracked firewall, but with a conversation. Someone calls a help desk, sounds convincing, and asks to reset an account. The MGM Resorts, Marks & Spencer, and Harrods incidents all trace back to that moment of misplaced trust. imper.ai, a cybersecurity company headquartered in New York, exists to close it.

Founded in 2024, imper.ai describes itself as the first identity verification platform purpose-built for the workforce. Where traditional identity tools check a document or a face at the point of login and then trust the session forever, imper.ai treats identity as something that must be confirmed across the whole employee lifecycle: when a candidate is interviewed, when a worker acts inside enterprise systems, and - critically - when someone asks to recover an account. The premise is blunt. In an era of deepfakes, voice cloning, and breach-data-fueled social engineering, the weakest link is not the channel. It is the assumption that the person on the other end is who they claim to be.

The company was built by three veterans of Israel's elite Unit 8200 intelligence unit, who say the idea took shape during reserve service in wartime while protecting real-time communications. They noticed the same gap the rest of the industry kept stepping around - the human behind the session was being verified by little more than confidence and a plausible story.

"Security is about truth: knowing who is really behind the digital identity."

That reframing - from guarding the perimeter to exposing the impersonator - shapes everything imper.ai builds. Its platform does not ask employees to upload passports or submit to biometric scans. Instead it reads the environment the person is operating from and asks questions only the real employee could answer from actual work context.

It is an approach designed for a specific and growing threat: generative AI has made impersonation cheap, fast, and convincing. A fraudster no longer needs to be a skilled hacker. They need a stolen credential, a cloned voice, and a help-desk agent trained to be helpful. imper.ai's argument is that the answer cannot be more friction for legitimate users - it has to be better signal, gathered invisibly, in the flow of work.

$28M
Total Raised
2024
Founded
3
Unit 8200 Founders
100s
Signals Analyzed
02

The Problems It Solves

Help Desk

Vishing & Account Recovery

Attackers call in and talk their way past an agent's discretion. imper.ai removes the guesswork from recovery decisions, eliminating the social-engineering opening behind breaches at MGM, Harrods, and Marks & Spencer.

Hiring

Fraudulent & Deepfaked Candidates

Fake applicants and AI-driven interview impersonation aim to get credentials issued to people who do not exist. imper.ai assesses a candidate's environment across multiple interviews - before a badge is ever printed.

Workforce

Shadow-Workforce Infiltration

Illegitimate or hidden workers slip into remote roles and daily operations. imper.ai continuously confirms the human behind the account across the tools where work actually happens.

03

How It Works

imper.ai combines two purpose-built technologies into a single agentless flow that slots into existing ITSM, HR, and applicant-tracking systems - no new app for employees to learn.

01

Verification Initiated

The platform triggers inside an existing workflow - a recovery request, an interview, a sensitive action.

02

Impersonation Detection

Hundreds of device, network, and behavioral signals are checked against expected interaction patterns.

03

Real-Time Risk Score

A live score with policy thresholds lets teams allow, restrict, or block the session instantly.

04

Contextual Verification

Dynamic, role-based questions grounded in real work context confirm the person - not their stolen data.

04

The Signals Behind the Score

Rather than trusting a document, the Impersonation Detection Engine reads the environment an attacker cannot easily fake.

Network

  • IP geolocation mismatches
  • VPN & proxy patterns
  • Network layout analysis

Device

  • VM & virtualization artifacts
  • Remote-control tooling (RDP, TeamViewer)
  • Browser & device mismatch

Digital Identity

  • Usage pattern analysis
  • Cross-channel consistency
  • Context-grounded questions
05

What Makes It Different

No Documents or Biometrics

Verification happens with no passport uploads, no face scans, and no manual review - avoiding the friction and privacy weight of traditional identity proofing.

Agentless by Design

It integrates into existing workflows and communication tools without deploying software on endpoints, keeping operations undisturbed.

Questions You Can't Google

Contextual prompts draw on real work information that cannot be sourced from breached data or public records - defeating breach-driven attacks.

Whole-Lifecycle Coverage

One platform spans hiring, daily work, and help-desk recovery, rather than verifying identity only once at login.

imper.ai sits in the emerging workforce-identity and ITDR category alongside players such as Nametag and Persona in help-desk verification, Socure and CLEAR in identity verification, and Reality Defender in deepfake detection. Its distinguishing bet is the pairing of infrastructure-signal impersonation detection with context-grounded human verification, sold as enterprise-native infrastructure and compliant with SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA.

06

The Founders

NA
Co-Founder & CEO

Noam Awadish

Former Chief of Staff to the EVP of Autonomous Vehicles at Mobileye, following service in Unit 8200. Leads the company's vision and go-to-market.

AB
Co-Founder & CPO

Anatoly Blighovsky

Previously headed two cyber divisions and served as Unit 8200's Chief Information Security Officer. Owns product direction.

RD
Co-Founder & CTO

Rom Dudkiewicz

Former vulnerability researcher and section leader at Unit 8200. Leads the engineering and detection technology.

07

Funding & Backers

Seed · Mid 2025$6.5M
Series A · Dec 2025$21.5M
Redpoint Ventures Battery Ventures Maple VC Vesey Ventures Cerca Partners
$28M
Total raised across seed and Series A, announced at the company's December 2025 public launch.

"Verify the human behind every interaction."

imper.ai - Company Mission
08

Timeline

2024

imper.ai founded

Three Unit 8200 veterans establish the company after spotting a real-time communications security gap during reserve service.

2025 · Mid

Seed round

Raises $6.5M to build real-time defense against AI-driven impersonation and social engineering.

2025 · December

Public launch & Series A

Emerges from stealth with a $21.5M Series A and $28M total, led by Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures.

2026 · March

Platform debut at RSAC

Launches its Workforce Identity Security platform at RSAC 2026, targeting help desk, hiring, and shadow-workforce use cases.

09

Who Uses It & Where It Fits

imper.ai sells to security and IT teams at enterprises in banking, financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, technology, and critical infrastructure. Early adopters span finance, healthcare, and technology - sectors where a single fraudulent account-recovery call or a fake hire can be catastrophic. The business model is B2B SaaS: an enterprise subscription to an agentless platform that plugs into existing ITSM, HR, and applicant-tracking systems and works across the communication tools where employees already operate - Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, and Google Workspace.

Model

B2B SaaS

Enterprise subscription, agentless deployment, sold to security and IT buyers.

Integrations

Enterprise-Native

ITSM, HR, ATS (e.g. Greenhouse), plus Zoom, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, Google Workspace.

Compliance

SOC 2 · GDPR · CCPA

Built to meet enterprise security and privacy requirements out of the box.

10

Frequently Asked

What does imper.ai do?

It provides an identity verification platform for the workforce that detects impersonation and prevents account takeover across the employee lifecycle - hiring, daily work, and help-desk account recovery - by combining infrastructure-signal analysis with AI-driven contextual verification.

Who founded imper.ai and where is it based?

It was founded in 2024 by Noam Awadish (CEO), Anatoly Blighovsky (CPO), and Rom Dudkiewicz (CTO), all veterans of Israel's Unit 8200. It is headquartered in New York with R&D in Israel.

How much funding has imper.ai raised?

$28M in total - a $6.5M seed round and a $21.5M Series A - led by Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures, with Maple VC, Vesey Ventures, and Cerca Partners participating.

How is it different from traditional identity verification?

It uses no documents, biometrics, or manual review. Instead it reads device, network, and behavioral signals to spot attacker-controlled environments and asks role-specific questions grounded in real work context that cannot be found in breached data.

What problems does it solve?

Help-desk vishing and account-recovery attacks, hiring fraud and deepfaked candidates, and shadow-workforce infiltration - the social-engineering vectors behind breaches like MGM, Marks & Spencer, and Harrods.

11

Explore & Share

Looking for a walkthrough? Product demos and founder interviews are published via imper.ai's LinkedIn page and on the platform site. No official YouTube channel was publicly listed at the time of writing.