CAT Labs, a start-up building forensic and cybersecurity tools to fight crypto-enabled crime, raised $4.3M in its pre-seed round led by Castle Island Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, CMT Digital, and RW3 Ventures.
Other participants in the investment round “include Newark Venture Partners, Hash3, Borderless Capital, Cryptoverse Ventures, and Outshine Ventures.”
CAT Labs was “founded by a former DOJ Special Agent, Lilita (Lili) Infante, who pioneered the first task force focused exclusively on dark web and crypto-enabled crime to solve some of the most challenging and high-profile crypto cases.”
Infante was “the lead agent on the case that took down Hydra Market – the largest and longest-running dark web market in the world – which accounted for 80% of all dark web cryptocurrency transactions and served as one of the largest global crypto laundering platforms.”
The global cost of cybercrime is “expected to reach 10.5tr by 2025. CAT Labs is building digital asset recovery and cybersecurity tools to enable governments to fight crypto crime.”
CAT Labs’ digital asset recovery tool “specializes in finding, identifying, analyzing, and seizing digital assets in criminal cases, allowing US government agencies, state, and local police departments, as well as US-allied countries, to accurately and efficiently process digital assets involved in criminal investigations.”
Lili Infante, Founder at CAT Labs, said:
“The explosion of crypto-targeted crimes like hacks, scams, and fraud is the biggest threat to the Web3 and DeFi revolution. We at CAT Labs see the incredible potential of distributed ledger technology as the future of the digital world. Our elite team of crypto forensics and cybersecurity professionals is working tirelessly to make this industry safe and secure by building tools to enable law enforcement to address crypto-enabled crime and by protecting investors from digital asset theft.”
In addition to helping governments address crypto-enabled crime, CAT Labs is building proactive cybersecurity tools “to prevent hacks, scams, and fraud from happening in the first place and protecting investors from digital asset theft.”
Their cybersecurity offering “includes a range of solutions from virtual cybersecurity support for crypto firms to specialized crypto cybersecurity tools.” The CAT Labs cybersecurity team is already working closely “with private sector customers to resolve highly-visible hacks and harden the cybersecurity system.”
The CAT Labs executive team is described as “the ‘Special Forces’ of crypto forensics and cybersecurity and includes Chief Security Officer, Uri Stav, former Chief Security and Development Officer of the Digital Currency Group (DCG) and its wholly-owned subsidiaries; Head of Growth, Monica Arias, a former Chainalysis business development lead; Head of Digital Forensics, John Hays, a former DOJ lead in forensic digital asset recovery; Head of Technology, Misha Hanin, an expert and thought leader in IT architecture, blockchain software development, and crypto cybersecurity; and Head of R&D, Roger Hallman, a Dartmouth Ph.D. candidate and former Computer Science and Cybersecurity expert at the Naval Information Warfare Center.”