Blackbird.AI Raises $20 Million to Fight Market Manipulation

Blackbird.AI, a narrative and risk intelligence firm driven by artificial intelligence (AI), has secured $20 million in Series B funding to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts, extend its offering to more customers and raise awareness around disinformation in key industries.

In a press release announcing the raise on Thursday (June 15), the company said publicly traded companies, for example, lose about $39 billion annually due to disinformation-related stock market losses, while $78 billion is lost globally each year.

Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder at Blackbird.AI, highlighted the growing threat of human perception in cyberattacks, manifesting as misinformation and narrative manipulation. “This emerging threat is impacting a broad range of sectors and professionals, from strategic communicators and risk managers to information security teams,” he said.

Khaled added: “We aim to help organizations understand and address the potential threats posed by perception manipulation, which often fly under the radar, fostering an environment of trust, safety and integrity, while simultaneously providing them with significant strategic and competitive leverage.”

Blackbird.AI’s Constellation Platform is designed to detect narratives, the risks they contain, and how these narratives propagate, in more than 25 languages. The platform analyzes text, images, and memes across the dark web, social media, news and other sources.

The rise of social media has allowed fraudsters easier access to a wider audience and market manipulation schemes are on the upswing through influencers’ peddling. Last December, the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged eight men with using the social media platforms Twitter and Discord to manipulate exchange-traded stocks in what’s known as a “pump and dump” scheme. The fraudsters allegedly bilked investors of $100 million.

They allegedly purchased stocks and urged their followers to buy those stocks by posting price targets or indicating they were buying, holding or adding to stock positions.

As PYMNTS reported last fall, pump-and-dump is a standard equities market scam in which a fraudster spreads a rumor that a worthless security is going to balloon in value, thus pumping up the price. The dump happens when the scammer quickly sells off the stock before the value crashes.