Spectrum Labs Scores $10M Series A to Detox the Internet
Many online communities resemble a biker bar with no bouncer: pushing and shoving, broken beer bottles, snapped pool sticks, pure lawlessness. Even worse, actually, because it’s not just the ZZ Top lookalikes in leather jackets you need to worry about — it’s everybody. Thousands, if not millions, of disgruntled keyboard warriors from all walks of life who can ruin your day in ten characters or less.
Spectrum Labs, an AI-powered moderation platform, wants to eliminate this toxicity that is simply too ubiquitous for outsourced moderators, keyword lists, or in-house legacy solutions to handle. It’s time for a cleanse, and Spectrum is giving the Internet the digital equivalent of apple cider vinegar.
Spotting negative interactions online doesn’t require much digging. Open any Twitter or reddit thread and you’re likely to find people flaming each other, ranging from lighthearted jabs to hateful vitriol aimed at a user’s race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, you name it. Sequestering due to the pandemic has driven even more users online and increased instances of harassment, particularly in the gaming industry. The result is twofold: the communities brands rely on for revenue are negatively impacted but, most importantly, users are subjected to online abuse that often can cause emotional and physical distress.
Spectrum’s automated hate eraser operates across multiple languages and specializes in protecting users in the gaming, dating, e-commerce, and social media verticals. Its contextual AI technology works in real-time to spot 40+ malicious behaviors — each a separately trained model — known to hamstring online communities. Thanks to Guardian, Spectrum’s suite of handy-dandy tools, Maggie the Moderator can identify and extinguish Frank the Flamer’s incendiary remarks with ease, plus other icky stuff like hate speech, scams, and doxxing. Guardian’s analytics dashboard, response automation builder, and model re-training center will turn any company’s mod squad into a more efficient bunch.
It’s easy to see why Ridge is jazzed to join Spectrum’s $10 million Series A, which will give moderators and Trust and Safety teams a much-needed assist and help consumer brands foster happy, harmonious, harm-free communities.
Even more awesome, Ridge gets to back an amazing enterprise technology AND team up with old friends. Our Spectrum Labs investment reunites us with Ridge founder Tom Chavez and the super{set} tribe, whom we previously joined in backing Habu earlier this year. We’re quite familiar with Justin Davis and Josh Newman as well, Spectrum’s CEO and CTO, respectively, who both worked at prior Ridge investment, Krux, before Salesforce acquired it for almost $1 billion. Davis, formerly a product whiz at Krux in charge of data privacy, NLP, and machine learning products, and Newman, an experienced software architect with a background in counterterrorism and biological weapons, form a powerful one-two punch.
Spectrum’s product and pedigree are an easy sell, but it’s no slouch in the customer department either. Pinterest, Riot Games, and popular e-commerce app Mercari utilize the service, in addition to its numerous partnerships with organizations focused on anti-bullying and safe online dating, among other causes.
Hats off to the entire Spectrum Labs team for building a solution that will benefit users offline as much as it will online. We are humbled to have a small part in making the digital sphere a place where comments, threads, existential convos (and cat gifs) can be exchanged free of judgment.
