How Cinder is building trust and safety infrastructure for the AI era

Executive overview

AI-enabled abuse has outpaced the infrastructure platforms use to stop it. Spam, deepfakes, non-consensual intimate imagery, and nation-state-grade attacks are now within reach of any teenager with a laptop. Without centralised tooling to handle this, platforms face a hard choice: slow down innovation to fix safety, or invite heavy regulation.

Cinder is a central platform for trust and safety operations — a configurable system that lets platforms set and enforce rules across their users. Founded by former NSA, FBI, and Facebook threat intelligence professionals, it raised $14M from YC and Accel.

If safety infrastructure doesn't scale with AI capabilities, innovation stalls — either by harm or by regulation.

From counterterrorism to content moderation

• Post-9/11 upbringing drove a career path into government counterterrorism roles.
• That led to Facebook's threat intelligence team, running red-team exercises to break platform defences.
• Conversations with dozens of companies revealed a shared, unsolved problem: no centralised abuse-handling tooling.
• The decision to build Cinder came when it became clear building it once centrally was better than helping each company build it internally.

Building the product

• Applied to YC an hour before the deadline; got in on condition of finding a co-founder.
• Assembled a founding team from former Facebook colleagues.
• First product was a threat intelligence platform — built after identifying real pain in previous roles.
• Customers said it was interesting but not what they needed; they wanted operational workflow tooling instead.
• Pivoted to focus tightly on the core customer problem: managing trust and safety operations end-to-end.

The decision spectrum framework

• Cinder's core framework places every abuse problem on a spectrum.
• Left end: simple, single-event decisions (e.g. "this image is CSAM", "this message is fraud").
• Right end: complex investigations into nation-state actors or advanced adversarial networks hiding their behaviour.
• The framework helps operators prioritise when everything feels equally urgent.

Sustaining the mission

• Reviewer burnout is real — teams face a constant uphill battle against harmful content.
• Mission alignment is Cinder's retention strategy: every team member is motivated by the outcome, not just the work.
• Wins — content taken down, abuses stopped — are shared openly to sustain momentum.
• Founders with direct experience of the harm build more effective products in this space.