---
title: "Alice’s $140M Raise: AI Trust & Safety Gets a PE-Led Growth Check"
description: "Apax Digital led Alice’s (ex-ActiveFence) $140M round — total $280M — with CRV and Norwest returning as labs and enterprises buy model testing and guardrails."
date: 2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z
tags: ["2026-vc-news", "startup-funding", "venture-capital", "artificial-intelligence", "cybersecurity", "crv", "norwest-venture-partners"]
source: https://venturecapitaltracker.com/2026-alice-140m-apax-ai-trust-safety
---

# Alice’s $140M Raise: AI Trust & Safety Gets a PE-Led Growth Check

> Apax Digital led Alice’s (ex-ActiveFence) $140M round — total $280M — with CRV and Norwest returning as labs and enterprises buy model testing and guardrails.

**Alice** (formerly **ActiveFence**) raised **$140 million** on **August 25, 2026**, led by **Apax Digital Funds**, bringing total funding to **$280 million**. Returning venture names include **[CRV](/fund/crv)** and **[Norwest Venture Partners](/fund/norwest-venture-partners)**.

**Unexpected truth:** the company is selling **adversarial internet memory** (Rabbit Hole) into frontier AI — a decade of platform abuse data re-aimed at jailbreaks, prompt injection, and agent overreach.

## Key facts

| Field | Detail |
| --- | --- |
| Company | Alice (NY + Tel Aviv; founded 2018 as ActiveFence) |
| Round | **$140M** (unlabeled; Apax Digital lead + board seat) |
| Date | August 25, 2026 |
| Cumulative | **$280M** total |
| Traction claims (company) | ~**$100M ARR** approaching; AI business **>500%** over two years; **8/10** top AI labs; **>3B** people protected online; **150+** AI security researchers |
| Product | Pre-release model testing + enterprise policy simulation + runtime monitoring |
| Valuation | **Not in company post** — press cites ~$700–800M (Ctech) / higher figures elsewhere |

## Who uses the product — and for what job

**Users (labs):** frontier model teams that need external red teams before ship — Alice names Anthropic, Google, and Cohere in launch materials.

**Users (enterprises):** companies deploying agents with real tools/data who need **policy-specific** guardrails beyond generic model refusals.

**Job:** find how models break *before* customers do; then monitor and constrain production behavior as agents gain authority.

## Why now

- Agent rollouts raise the cost of “model did something we never intended.”
- Safety reports and incident catalogs (company cites International AI Safety Report 2026 and METR-style agent overreach examples) moved AI security from optional to procurement line item.
- PE-led growth capital arriving is a category signal: buyers treat AI T&S as recurring infrastructure, not a research grant.

## Why Apax / CRV / Norwest — portfolio fit

| Investor | Fit |
| --- | --- |
| Apax Digital | Growth check into near-$100M ARR AI security; board seat = scale GTM + category definition |
| [CRV](/fund/crv) | Returning early trust/safety venture capital through the ActiveFence → Alice transition |
| [Norwest](/fund/norwest-venture-partners) | Returning growth-oriented cyber / enterprise software capital |

**Likely founder rationale:** pair a PE growth lead that underwrites sales scale with the venture syndicate that already financed the adversarial-data moat — avoid resetting diligence on Rabbit Hole.

We do **not** list Apax as a `/fund/` entity — name is press/company-sourced only.

## Competitive map

| Player | Lane |
| --- | --- |
| [Zenity](/2026-zenity-125m-series-c-norwest-ai-agent-security) | Agent security posture / governance |
| [Corma](/2026-corma-60m-seed-sequoia-defensive-cyber-ai) | Earlier defensive cyber AI |
| Lab-native safety teams | In-house red team; Alice sells external adversarial coverage |
| Classic content moderation vendors | Adjacent history (ActiveFence roots); Alice reframes for model lifecycle |

## When not to over-read

- Do **not** freeze a valuation from secondary press.
- ARR and “8 of 10 labs” are company claims — diligence independently.
- Apax lead ≠ traditional Series letter; structure is growth/minority financing language.

## Practical takeaway

- **Founders (AI security):** Lead with **production agent risk** and proprietary attack memory, not generic “AI safety” slogans.
- **Investors:** Returning CRV/Norwest + PE lead is a maturation pattern — underwrite enterprise expansion, not only lab logos.
- **Operators:** Separate lab pre-ship testing from enterprise runtime guardrails when comparing vendors.

### Sources

1. https://alice.io/blog/alice-raises-140m
2. https://www.securityweek.com/alice-raises-140m-to-expand-ai-model-defenses-and-enterprise-guardrails/
3. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/a8lj22cfo

**By:** [Venture Capital Tracker](https://venturecapitaltracker.com/editorial-policy)
**Last updated:** August 28, 2026

**Editorial note:** AI tools assisted with research, structure, or drafting. Venture Capital Tracker retains human editorial responsibility for factual accuracy, relevance, and source quality before publication.