technology
Reken Launches Northstar, an On-Device AI Tool for Phishing and Fraud Defense
Reken launched its Private Core platform and Northstar phishing defense tool on July 13 after two years of development. The startup, founded by former Google and Shape Security executive Shuman Ghosemajumder, raised $10 million in seed funding. Northstar is available immediately through an early-access program for enterprises.
Jul 13, 9:00 AM·2m read1 source
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Reken emerged from two years of stealth development on July 13 with an on-device AI security platform called the Reken Private Core and its first product, Northstar, a phishing-and-fraud defense tool. Fortune reported that the platform uses small proprietary AI models that run directly on user devices rather than sending data to the cloud.
Shuman Ghosemajumder, who previously led click-fraud prevention at Google and founded Shape Security, which F5 acquired for $1 billion in 2020, cofounded Reken in 2024 with former Shape colleague Rich Griffiths.
The company raised $10 million in seed funding from Greycroft and FPV Ventures. Northstar is available starting July 13 through an early-access program for corporations, government agencies, and universities. Ghosemajumder said the product has already been tested in Fortune 500 environments.
The company plans additional products and to allow third parties to build on the Private Core. Ghosemajumder stated that the central technical challenge was running high-quality AI models on ordinary corporate laptops without GPUs at speeds sufficient to block threats in real time.
“You could take an LLM and figure out a way to quantize it so that you could run it with fewer resources and run it on a machine that didn’t have GPUs, but if it still runs at the speed of a full LLM, then it’s not going to be able to produce a result in a timeframe that matters,” he told Fortune.
He added that Northstar is intended to replace corporate security-awareness training. “We shouldn’t be forcing employees to become forensic digital investigators,” Ghosemajumder said. ” Fortune reported that Reken plans to aggregate and anonymize threat intelligence across a network of users so the system improves without exposing individual data.
