Company Overview
About Cinder
Cinder is a San Francisco-based trust and safety platform — backed by Y Combinator (W22) with $14 million raised from AWS Generative AI Accelerator, Accel, Pioneer Fund, Webb Investment Network, and YC — providing AI labs, e-commerce platforms, and social media companies with infrastructure to orchestrate and automate content moderation, AI safety red-teaming, policy enforcement, and data compliance workflows, while uniquely combining content moderation operations with AI training data labeling to create high-quality, policy-informed datasets. Founded in 2021 by Glen Wise (former Facebook security engineer) and Phil Brennan (former US government counterterrorism specialist), Cinder launched from stealth in December 2022 after two years of building with early enterprise customers.
Business Model & Competitive Advantage
Cinder's platform addresses the operational complexity of trust and safety at scale: managing the moderation queue (millions of pieces of user-generated content that require human or AI policy review), routing content to appropriate review queues based on content type and policy violation category, tracking the chain of custody for moderation decisions (critical for legal and regulatory audit), and measuring moderation quality and policy consistency across distributed reviewer teams. The AI safety application (supporting frontier AI labs in red-teaming and safety evaluation of foundation models) creates an emerging use case where Cinder's content review infrastructure applies to AI model output safety rather than only user-generated content — a high-value customer segment given the compliance requirements that AI model developers face under emerging AI regulations in the EU and US.
Competitive Landscape 2025–2026
In 2025, Cinder competes in the trust and safety operations, content moderation, and AI safety infrastructure market with ActiveFence (trust and safety platform, $100M raised), Hive Moderation (AI-powered content moderation, $85M raised), and Two Hat Security (content safety, Microsoft acquisition) for trust and safety platform adoption. Glen Wise's Facebook security background and Phil Brennan's government counterterrorism expertise create domain authority with enterprise trust and safety buyers who prioritize operational credibility over startup pedigree. AWS Generative AI Accelerator participation signals AWS's strategic interest in trust and safety infrastructure for the AI developer ecosystem building on AWS. The 2025 strategy focuses on the AI safety application for foundation model developers (expanding beyond traditional content moderation to AI output evaluation), growing the data labeling-for-policy business (where moderation decisions inform AI training data quality), and building the regulatory compliance module for EU AI Act and US AI Executive Order requirements.
Open Positions
Reddit Discussions
Key Differentiators
Emerging Innovator
Cinder is an emerging player bringing innovative solutions to the Infrastructure market.
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