AI has compressed cyberattacks from months to minutes, and the outsourced IT layer just raised $50M to catch up

Inforcer, a London-based company building security and management software for managed service providers, raised a $50 million Series C on Thursday, bringing its total funding to $110 million in just 18 months 1.

The $110 million reveals where the pressure is building. Inforcer does not sell to businesses directly. It builds the platform that managed service providers, or MSPs, use to manage their small and medium-sized business clients' Microsoft 365 accounts from a single platform 1. MSPs are the outsourced IT firms that handle technology for companies that cannot afford in-house departments 1. The threats facing those clients have changed faster than the tools meant to stop them.

According to Inforcer co-founder and chief community officer William Connor, attacks now take minutes to execute rather than months to plan 1. TechCrunch reports that attackers are using AI to analyze what to attack in a company, and using LLMs to help craft more convincing phishing emails 1. The practical effect is a collapse in the time between when an attacker starts probing and when the breach lands. Defenders who once had a window of weeks to notice and respond are now operating on a clock measured in the time it takes to walk to the kitchen and back.

That compression hits hardest where the defenses are thinnest. Small and medium-sized companies typically cannot afford in-house IT, which is precisely why they outsource to MSPs 1. The MSP channel is, for all practical purposes, the security layer for these businesses. And it is defending clients against threats that are "more automated, more scalable and harder to defend against than we've ever seen before," Inforcer co-founder and CEO Jamie Daum told TechCrunch 1.

Inforcer says it has been growing 300 percent year-over-year and has doubled its valuation between its Series B and Series C rounds, though Daum declined to share that number 1. The Series C was led by Insight Partners 1. Inforcer launched in 2023 1.

What makes Inforcer's product roadmap worth tracking is what it reveals about where the attack surface is actually moving. The company has built Shadow AI detection, a feature designed to flag when employees are using unauthorized AI tools on company devices 1. It has also launched a threat detection and response tool to catch cybersecurity risks as they happen 1.

The AI adoption that lets an employee paste client data into an unvetted chatbot also expands what an attacker can reach. Connor told TechCrunch that beyond hackers, organizations also face risks around how they govern and protect company data and the use of AI and agents within their businesses 1.

Its original product, 365 Manager, was priced per client. With the threat detection tool, the company is shifting toward per-user pricing that better matches how MSPs sell these tools to their customers, and Daum indicated that some of Inforcer's future products could adopt consumption or token-based pricing 1.

The company says it will stay focused on the Microsoft suite, noting that many small businesses still rely on it 1. Connor said Microsoft has historically built platforms for larger enterprises, leaving room for specialized vendors to serve smaller customers, and described Inforcer as complementary to Microsoft rather than competitive with it 1.

For builders and investors, the takeaway is narrower and more useful than "AI security is a big market." The businesses most exposed to AI-accelerated threats are the small companies whose attack surface multiplied practically overnight, and whose defenders are MSPs still working with tooling designed for a slower threat landscape. Inforcer's $110 million in 18 months is a wager that the channel defending the real economy needs a ground-up rebuild. The $50 million round is the headline. The demand underneath it is the actual story.