Crypto has long been a goldmine for hackers, offering fast, anonymous access to vast sums of money, often through a single line of faulty code. To date, more than $11 billion has been stolen in such exploits, according to DefiLlama. And while smart contract audits are now standard practice, they’re often too slow, too manual and too late.
Giovanni Vignone, 22, saw the opening before even finishing college. While studying computer science and machine learning at Duke University, he understood the challenge firsthand as a founding engineer at Mural, a payments startup previously focused on crypto, launched by Palantir alumni and backed by Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital. He watched teams pour hundreds of thousands into audits only to get exploited anyway. “In crypto every hack directly corresponds to the equivalent of a bank account liquidation. It’s like hacking JPMorgan every single time,” he says. So he dropped out to build Octane, an AI-powered security platform designed to stop attacks before they happen.
Today, the company announced a $6.75 million seed round co-led by Archetype and Winklevoss Capital, the family office of Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. Other backers include Gemini Frontier Fund, the crypto exchange’s venture arm, Circle, Druid Ventures, Duke Capital Partners and a roster of strategic angels, including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Octane’s core pitch: complement the reactive audit model with always-on AI defense. “We want to deliver an AI security engineer to every crypto team,” says Vignone. “Teams in crypto are spending anywhere between $150,000 or $200,000 a year on smart contract security and are still getting hacked. What we really want to bring to these teams is a continuous approach to security.”
Its models are trained on a broad dataset of real-world exploits, audit reports and open-source repositories. The platform can identify vulnerabilities like frontrunnable exchange rates and drainable swap contracts in under a minute. The platform already counts 15 enterprise clients, including Circle, issuer of the $60 billion stablecoin USDC, and Decent.xyz, which provides tools enabling cross-blockchain transactions. Gemini is also exploring integrating Octane’s tech.
“We believe Octane will set a new standard for smart contract security – bringing greater resilience and confidence to the ecosystem and eventually the broader cybersecurity domain,” said Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in a joint statement to Forbes. “Gio is a rare founder that sees the present clearly, knows what needs to be built, and can assemble a world-class team to make it happen.”
While Octane is currently focused on smart contract vulnerabilities, Vignone says the company’s ambitions extend far beyond. In the future, it aims to detect and prevent more complex attacks like the recent $1.4 billion Bybit hack, which relied on phishing and malware rather than faulty code.
The funding will go toward product development, expanding the engineering team and scaling Octane’s reach.
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