Dave DeWalt Makes Strategic Investment In Blackbird.AI And Joins As Advisory Board Chairman To Help Protect Organizations From Narrative Attacks Created By Misinformation and Disinformation

NEW YORK, July 23, 2024 – Blackbird.AI, the leader in AI-driven Narrative Intelligence, today announced a strategic investment from cybersecurity leader Dave DeWalt, the Founder and CEO of NightDragon. The funds will extend the company’s leadership position in protecting the global 2000, national security, and public sector organizations from narrative attacks created by misinformation and disinformation. 

The World Economic Forum named misinformation and disinformation the #1 global risk in 2024. It will continue to escalate as AI tools in the hands of threat actors make it easier for them to create and manipulate harmful narratives targeting organizations during crisis events, cyber incidents, executive targeting, market manipulation, geopolitical risk, and brand cancellation incidents. To illustrate how Blackbird.AI’s Narrative Intelligence Platform can detect narrative attacks created by misinformation and disinformation and how they can impact an organization at a massive scale, the company recently published a narrative intelligence report about the harmful narratives spreading about the CrowdStrike outage.

David DeWalt is the CEO and Founder of venture capital firm NightDragon, a veteran CEO and investor who has led companies, from startups to the Fortune 500, on transformational journeys of success. Focused on technology and cybersecurity, he helped create over $20 billion in shareholder value during his 15-plus years as president and CEO of three major companies. Along with Dave’s investment in Blackbird.AI, he will take on the role of Chairman of the company’s Advisory Board to engage directly on strategy and lead the advisory board team to deepen strategic relationships with customers and partners in the cybersecurity industry. 

“With cyber incidents, wars, and elections, executive teams and security leaders now face a new threat vector of narrative attacks that cause significant reputational, financial, and operational harm,” said Dave DeWalt, cybersecurity investor and CEO and Founder of NightDragon. “As we outlined in the NightDragon Market Report on Disinformation, we speak with business and cybersecurity leaders every day, and they realize they have a massive gap in being able to monitor for narrative attacks proactively. When I discovered what Blackbird.AI’s mission was, the global customers they protect, and the mission-driven team of AI experts that created their AI-based Narrative Intelligence Platform, I knew I had to get behind them. We are seeing a significant market opportunity arise for innovators like Blackbird.AI to mitigate risk using artificial intelligence.”

Blackbird’s industry-leading AI-based Narrative Intelligence Platform, Constellation, enables organizations to gain awareness of the harmful narratives that are impacting them. Beyond that, Constellation provides insight into, the networks these narratives move across (including social media, news, and the dark web), the threat actors behind them, the malicious bots that scale them, and the hyper-agenda driven individuals, cohorts and communities that influence and connect them to help organizations make better strategic decisions, especially in times of crisis.

“We have seen incredible commercial and investor interest over the past twelve months as narrative attacks have become a major new threat vector to all organizations. Nation states, cybercriminals, agenda-driven groups, and individuals can easily scale up and manipulate harmful narratives that can start with a single post to do major damage in an instant,” said Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder of Blackbird.AI. “We have dedicated our lives over the past seven years to creating the world’s best AI-driven Narrative Intelligence Platform. Dave DeWalt’s strategic investment and leading our Advisory board will accelerate our ability to help protect top organizations from narrative attacks created by misinformation and disinformation.”

To meet with Blackbird.AI at Black Hat, visit us here. To learn more about how Blackbird.AI can help protect your organization from narrative attacks created by misinformation and disinformation, visit us at www.Blackbird.AI.