Safehire.ai secures £500,000 follow-on funding to expand digital risk screening

London-based digital risk intelligence company Safehire.ai has secured a £500,000 follow-on investment from a private investor. The funding follows a £1.05 million seed investment round closed in April 2025, bringing the total capital raised by the company to £1.55 million.

Safehire.ai was established in 2024 by former British Army officers Simon Holden and Sean Lumley. Holden previously worked as a school bursar and founded a cybersecurity firm, while Lumley is a technology entrepreneur who co-founded CybSafe, a human risk management and behavioural cybersecurity platform.

The firm provides digital risk screening intended for high-trust hiring, safeguarding and workforce assurance decisions. Its platform searches for risk signals across surface, deep and dark web sources, with findings reviewed by human analysts prior to reporting.

Simon Holden, co-founder and CEO of Safehire.ai, commented: “Safehire challenges the idea that traditional checks are enough. By looking beyond the surface, we help organisations identify hidden risk, strengthen safeguarding and make high-trust decisions with greater confidence. This investment allows us to scale Digital Risk Screening beyond education, support larger enterprise use cases, develop our insider risk capability and prepare for expansion into other jurisdictions.”

Saehire’s methodology uses analytical processes derived from military intelligence, combining large language models trained around those methods with verification by analysts trained in military intelligence. The company states that conventional background checks fail to identify digital exposure, behavioural risks, or online activity relevant to safeguarding, workforce risk, or insider risk.

“These checks could include DBS (or equivalent) and BPSS, credit checks, and employment references and history. At a time when the digital risk surface around people has become far more complex, fragmented and difficult to assess, searches are often conducted by untrained HR personnel, while those conducted in a traditional manner by professional vetting staff might cost £1,500 per search,” Safehire.ai mentioned in a press release.

The firm’s Digital Risk Screening platform analyses open-source data from the surface, deep and dark web, applies artificial intelligence to add context to raw data, and uses human analyst verification to generate background risk reports.

The platform allows organisations to carry out over 10,000 searches per day, compared to approximately 15 searches achieved by an individual analyst. A multi-academy trust using the system reported an average time saving of one hour per candidate for its human resources team.

Safehire.ai operates across various sectors, including education, care, sport, charities, regulated workforces, public-sector supply chains, financial services and critical infrastructure. In July 2025, the company partnered with the Internet Watch Foundation to integrate child safety data into recruitment screening.