Safehire.ai, a London-based digital risk intelligence company helping organisations make safer, more informed hiring and access decisions, has secured a €583.2k (£500k) follow-on investment from a private investor.
This round, together with the €1.22 million (£1.05 million) Seed investment round closed in April 2025, brings total investment to €1.8 million (£1.55 million).
“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,” said Simon Holden, co-founder and CEO of Safehire.ai.
Safehire.ai was founded in 2024 by former British Army officers Simon Holden and Sean Lumley. Holden is a former school bursar and cybersecurity founder who saw the digital risk visibility gap facing education first-hand, and Lumley is a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of CybSafe, a human risk management and behavioural cybersecurity platform.
The company states that it provides digital risk screening for high-trust hiring, safeguarding and workforce assurance decisions. Its platform helps organisations identify relevant digital risk signals across surface, deep and dark web sources, with findings reviewed by human analysts before being reported.
Its methodology draws on military intelligence analytical processes, combining large language model capability trained around those methods with human verification by ex-military intelligence-trained analysts.
According to the company, there is a growing digital risk signal visibility gap in recruitment and workforce integrity. It notes that traditional checks do not always surface relevant digital exposure, behavioural risk, or online activity that may be material to safeguarding, workforce risk, insider risk or other high-trust access decisions.
“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 UK startup highlighted that its Digital Risk Screening (DRS) platform first searches open-source data on the surface, deep and dark web, then applies AI-enriched context to the raw data before finally integrating human analyst verification to produce evidence‑based digital intelligence packaged into easy-to-understand background risk reports.
DRS enables organisations to conduct over 10,000 searches per day, instead of the 15 searches a single human analyst can achieve, and at a fraction of the cost. The company reported that one large multi-academy trust said using Safehire.ai DRS checks saved its HR team an average of 1 hour per candidate.
Safehire.ai works with organisations across education, care, sport, charities, regulated workforces, public-sector supply chains, financial services and critical infrastructure.