Redcoat AI

Redcoat AI, founded in 2023 by CEO John Whaley, a Stanford computer science adjunct lecturer and serial founder, together with co-founders Kelly Byrd and Mike Morris, emerged from stealth in March 2024 with $4.24 million in seed funding led by Pear VC, with J2 Ventures, Kyber Knight, Leonis Capital, and Sancus Ventures participating. The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The platform targets AI-era social engineering, including deepfake voice and video, contextually personalized phishing, and LLM-generated impersonation attacks. It combines an on-demand AI red-teaming service that simulates these attacks against an organization’s own employees with a mobile-focused defense layer extending protection across SMS, WhatsApp, and other messaging channels where traditional email-centric security tools have no visibility.

The mobile and messaging-channel focus addresses a genuine gap most enterprise security stacks don’t cover: email security is a mature category, but SMS and WhatsApp-based social engineering largely is not. The founding team’s applied-AI and security credentials give the red-teaming service technical credibility, but as a nine-person, single-round seed company, Redcoat AI is early and unproven at scale, with efficacy claims not yet independently validated beyond its funding announcement.