Social Links just dropped a $3M follow-on round, and the timing feels poetic. In a year where AI handed every scammer, troll farm, and digital grifter a brand-new bag of tricks, Social Links answered with something far more interesting than another dashboard. They built an Autopilot for the chaos. Watching Co-Founder and CEO Ivan Shkvarun steer this company from its early bootstrapped grind to a global OSINT force is the kind of arc that makes you appreciate the difference between companies that chase noise and companies that study the signal until it sings. Co-Founder Andrey Kulikov set the original blueprint back in 2015, and the evolution since then has been a masterclass in staying obsessive about the craft instead of the hype.
This round hits different because Yellow Rocks! did not just participate. They multiplied their commitment by six. When Managing Partner Sergei Bogdanov said AI gave criminals superpowers while most protection tools stayed stuck in a pre-AI world, he was basically describing the gap Social Links has been quietly closing for over 10 years. AltaIR Capital and Smart Partnership Capital returning for more says plenty about what happens when performance outpaces the pitch deck. 450+ customers across 90+ countries, 170 government entities, 280 businesses, and S&P 500 orgs that do not exactly hand out trust like candy. An 80% YoY growth trajectory across six straight years is not luck. It is product-market inevitability.
The company’s footprint stretches from NY to Amsterdam to its R&D center in Riga, all while keeping its infrastructure locked inside Europe. No drama. No breadcrumbs. No stored queries. Just metadata that minds its own business. That purity of design shows up in everything they ship. SL Professional with 1,700+ search methods. SL Crimewall turning OSINT into a living map instead of a static report. SL API acting like connective tissue for enterprises. Gamayun making investigations accessible without diluting power. SL Private Platform keeping investigations sealed off from the outside world. This is not a catalog. It is an ecosystem built with the paranoia of a security researcher and the precision of an engineer who never forgot the math.
AI Defender Autopilot is the through-line. A collaborative agent system that hunts fraud, misinformation, deepfakes, synthetic identities, and every AI-driven stunt criminals think is new. COO Axel Kettenring brings scale discipline, Independent Board Member and Interim CFO Mikhail Fedotov brings financial rigor shaped by 38 exits, and Global Head of Customer Success Luisa Munoz ensures the enterprise side never falls into the classic “great tech, bad adoption” trap. Even partnership leads like Arina Tsygankova help extend the network effect.
This $3M round is not about burn. It is about acceleration. New regions. New verticals. New products built on the same Autopilot backbone that is already proving its edge. If the open-source world is the ocean, Social Links did not just build a boat. They built sonar. And the deeper you look, the more you understand why this company keeps winning the trust of the people who cannot afford to guess.
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