Stopping Cybercrime at Inception: How Inception Cyber Created a New Paradigm for Threat Detection

Cybersecurity may be a mature market, but most of the threat detection tools available today were designed before the age of AI. Approaches like signature-based filters and sandboxing rely on recognition of known threats, predictable fraud indicators, or visibility of malicious payloads. Defense methods were not built to thwart sophisticated attacks powered by generative AI.

Tools like FraudGPT are now helping criminals generate sophisticated phishing emails that are nearly indistinguishable from legitimate messages. Ransomware droppers are hidden behind multiple layers of obfuscation. Criminals even use AI to monitor targets’ social media accounts and mimic company communication practices to create dangerously deceptive Business Email Compromise (BEC) messages that lull employees into a false sense of trust.

The impact is severe. Generative AI contributed to a 140% increase in browser-based phishing attacks, a 130% jump in zero-hour phishing attacks in 2024, and a 1760 % increase in BEC between 2022 and 2024.

This new wave of threats calls for a completely new detection paradigm—one that focuses on the intent behind malicious emails and the subtle cues that bypass conventional threat detection tools, rather than simply detecting known threats. For that reason, I am thrilled to announce Neotribe’s investment in Inception Cyber, an AI-native security company that truly changes the threat detection paradigm. The company’s breakthrough platform, Neural Analysis and Correlation Engine (NACE™) uses generative and predictive AI to detect and prevent evasive AI-generated threats that bypass traditional email security.

NACE™ analyzes message composition, attacker intent, and the contextual interplay among SMTP headers, deep file parsing results, and URL data. Rather than modeling typical employee behavior in order to spot anomalies, it models the attackers themselves—their tactics, techniques, and intentions. This allows NACE™ to catch threats that other tools don’t—an average of one per employee, per day—while also generating fewer false alarms.

I’ve known CEO and co-founder Bill Mann for a few years and got to know him very well over the past 2 years. We even considered Bill as a CEO candidate for another company. I was so impressed with his product capabilities and leadership skills that I told him we’d back him if he ever started a new company of his own. That he did, and with a true co-star in CTO Abhishek Singh, a former Cisco, FireEye, and Microsoft exec holding 41 patents in AI and cybersecurity. We were so excited by the possibility of what Bill and Abhishek came up with that we said “yes” immediately. 

A year on, Inception Cyber has a solid MVP and is already deployed across multiple-sized companies and verticals, including security startups, international manufacturing, and huge US financial institutions. The company will be making its formal debut at RSAC 2025 on April 30, where Abhishaik is presenting on the topic of “Leveraging Generative and Predictive AI for the Detection of AI-based Attacks.”

Please join me in welcoming the newest member of the Neotribe family—Inception Cyber!