ActiveFence Acquires Rewire as it Builds the Next Generation of AI for Trust & Safety

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Mar 08, 2023, 10:00 ET

The innovative AI startup will contribute state-of-the-art models for identifying harmful text-based content

NEW YORK, March 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- ActiveFence, whose mission is to protect online platforms and their users from malicious behavior and harmful content, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Rewire, a London-based startup that's building AI for online safety. Combining ActiveFence's leading Trust and Safety platform, content detection AI models and scalable API with Rewire's repertoire of innovative text models will arm customers in the fight against malicious behavior, allowing them to reliably find and take action against dangers at scale in real time.

AI is a game-changer when battling harmful content online. Rewire has developed a catalog of state-of-the-art AI models for detecting different types of harmful text-based content, including insults, hate speech, profanity, violence, sexually explicit language and suicide and self-harm content. Rewire will support and help strengthen ActiveFence's existing AI text models to better defend customers against harmful content.

"AI is the key to powering our fight against online threat actors, but your defense is only as good as your AI models," said ActiveFence CEO and Co-Founder Noam Schwartz. "Joining forces with Rewire will allow us to build even more accurate and trustworthy models more efficiently, bringing together Rewire's high-quality datasets with ActiveFence's assets and infrastructure to create a significant step forward in AI for online safety at scale."

Rewire's best-in-class performance results from their proprietary development process, which trains better models using less data and can be adapted for a range of different tasks. Rewire is able to use relatively small amounts of labeled data because it deploys adversarial data generation. This works iteratively, generating data that challenges models, which then uses that data to retrain and strengthen models where they are weak. Through this process, Rewire has helped detect sexist content, flagged harmful customer feedback and helped a German nonprofit monitor anti-Semitic messages on German Telegram channels.

"Rewire's founding mission is to change how platforms moderate online content, and build an open and accessible internet where people are safe from harm," said Bertie Vidgen, CEO of Rewire who co-founded the company with Chief Technology Officer Paul Röttger in 2021. "Joining ActiveFence will help us extend this vision to the more than 3 billion users that ActiveFence protects, using our AI models to detect even the most evasive harmful content."

About ActiveFence

ActiveFence is the leading solution for Trust and Safety intelligence and management, protecting online platforms and their users from malicious behavior and content. Trust and Safety teams of all sizes rely on ActiveFence to keep their users safe from the widest spectrum of online harms, unwanted content, and malicious behavior, including child safety and exploitation, disinformation, hate speech, terror, nudity, fraud, and more. We offer a full stack of capabilities with our deep intelligence research, AI-driven harmful content detection, and content moderation platform. Protecting over three billion users globally everyday in 100 languages, ActiveFence lets people interact and thrive online. Backed by leading Silicon Valley investors such as CRV and Norwest, ActiveFence has raised $100M to date, and employs over 300 people worldwide.

About Rewire

Rewire is a London startup building socially responsible AI for online safety. It protects online communities by finding, monitoring, and actioning harmful and dangerous content at scale, using data-driven artificial intelligence. Rewire was founded in 2021 by Bertie Vidgen and Paul Röttger, researchers from the University of Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute.

SOURCE ActiveFence