Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Moonshots Capital Leads Investment In Startup Uncovering Propaganda, Bot Farms
Los Angeles-based Moonshots Capital is the lead investor in the seed round of a startup, New Knowledge, which developed the artificial intelligence software which uncovered a large-scale Russian effort to influence U.S. presidential elections. According to New Knowledge, it has raised $1.9M in a seed funding, which was led by Moonshots Capital, and also included participation from Haystack, GGV Capital, Geekdom Fund, Capital Factory and Spitfire Ventures. As part of the investment, Kelly Perdew, the founder of Moonshots Capital, has joined the board of New Knowledge.
New Knowledge said it identified the fake accounts behind the large-scale Russian effort to influence U.S. presidential elections in the summer of 2016, a year before social media companies admitted that those accounts were tied to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency. The Kremlin has run many classic military disinformation campaigns in the past--including in the Ukraine in 2014, in Sweden in 2016, and during the Cold War. New Knowledge's co-founders include a former State Department counterterrorism advisor and a former NSA and military intelligence veteran.
In an interesting intersection between politics, venture investing, and cybersecurity, Moonshots Capital's Perdew--a highly-respected investor in the Los Angeles venture capital community, and a major advocate for entrepeneurs--once held a role at the Trump Organization after winning the second season of The Apprentice. Perdew got his start in the US Army as a Military Intelligence Officer and Airborne Ranger, and has also been very active helping former military members enter the entrepreneurial world.