Caden Flynn Scott's Azonic raises undisclosed pre-seed for law-enforcement AI
Blackbird and Antler backed the Auckland startup, which says investigators in New Zealand, Australia and the US already use its platform.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: Azonic
Why it matters
Scott is turning IOC3's investigative experience into a government-software wedge, but Azonic must prove its virtual analyst can survive procurement and courtroom scrutiny.
Caden Flynn Scott and Thomas Holdom announced an undisclosed pre-seed round for Azonic on August 25th, bringing Blackbird, Antler and three other founders behind their attempt to give online-crime investigators an AI-powered virtual analyst.
Azonic says investigators in New Zealand, Australia and the United States are already working with the platform. It has not named the agencies, disclosed whether they are paying customers or provided revenue, contract or usage figures. The round's valuation, closing date and ownership terms were also left out of the announcement. (Azonic)
Scott's path into online-crime work began inside Roblox. He started building games on the platform at age 10, teaching himself to program before becoming concerned about exploitation, extortion and other harms affecting younger users. That work developed into the International Online Crime Coordination Center, or IOC3, a nonprofit that connects victims, technology platforms, analysts and law-enforcement agencies across jurisdictions. (University of Auckland)
The university reported in March that IOC3 reviews reports from services including Roblox, Discord, X, Instagram, Snapchat and Telegram, then routes intelligence to relevant partners. Scott described the psychological cost of the work while explaining why he stayed with it: "What offsets that is knowing the work helps victims get justice and helps keep other people safe." (University of Auckland)
Turning casework into software
Azonic packages the workflow Scott encountered at IOC3 into a commercial product. Reports, case files and intelligence sources sit in one workspace, while software agents follow leads, connect related cases, conduct parallel research and draft investigative outputs. Azonic says human analysts retain control of decisions and can inspect the reasoning behind the system's findings. (Azonic)
Holdom is responsible for the engineering underneath that pitch. He created CloudCrack, an open-source command-line tool that uses AWS infrastructure for password-hashing work. Azonic says he later built AI systems for large, regulated organizations, though the announcement does not identify those organizations. (Azonic)
The founders are targeting child-protection units, counter-extremism teams and investigators handling sextortion, fraud and other crimes that move across platforms and national borders. Azonic says agencies can run the system on premises or in their own cloud, keep agency data within their environment and maintain an audit trail. Its website lists SOC 2 and ISO 27001 work as in progress.
Those controls will matter alongside the quality of Azonic's models. Investigative software has to document where information came from, who accessed it, how an automated conclusion was produced and whether the underlying evidence can be defended in court. Azonic's public materials do not identify its model providers, data integrations or process for validating AI-generated findings.
The government-market shortcut
Blackbird and Antler backed the round alongside Crimson Education founder Jamie Beaton, Pushpay co-founder Eliot Crowther and Emerge founder Jovan Pavlicevic. (Azonic)
Azonic also lists advisers with backgrounds in US intelligence and government security. Michael Hurley is a former CIA official and former Palantir senior adviser to CEO Alex Karp. Brad Brekke was the founding director of the FBI's Office of the Private Sector. (Michael Hurley)
The advisers' backgrounds are relevant to the security and procurement questions Azonic will face, but they do not establish that the system meets evidentiary, security or accuracy requirements. Their scope of work and financial interests in Azonic were not specified. Their experience still gives a two-founder New Zealand company relevant perspective on how US agencies evaluate intelligence products and how established vendors sell into those institutions.
Azonic is entering a field with established investigative platforms and newer AI specialists. Palantir Gotham already integrates sensitive government data for defense and intelligence users. Babel Street describes its criminal-investigations offering as open-source intelligence software with AI-driven threat detection, entity resolution and investigative analysis. Siren describes K9 as an AI companion that searches data, analyzes graphs, uncovers connections and provides explainable insights. Multitude Insights raised $10 million for software that links reports across law-enforcement agencies. (Palantir)
Azonic's wedge is narrower: online crime and the repetitive investigative groundwork surrounding each lead. Scott's IOC3 work gives the founders direct exposure to that casework, while the pre-seed capital buys time to convert it into a product agencies can deploy under their own controls.
Azonic still has to show that its virtual analyst produces reliable, reviewable work rather than simply generating plausible case narratives faster. The company says the round will fund the next stage of product development and deeper work with investigators. Its first commercial test is whether those agency relationships become durable contracts without weakening the human oversight the founders have made central to the pitch. (Azonic)