Last updated: 2026-08-19
Cinder is an AI-native trust and safety platform that automates 94% of human content review through policy-driven AI agents and case management workflows. It combines policy management, workflow orchestration, audit trails and analytics in one system, letting teams enforce content and account policy without stitching together separate classifiers and spreadsheets.
About Cinder
Cinder is a trust and safety operations platform built by Glen Wise, Phil Brennan, Brian Fishman and Declan Cummings, who previously worked on counterterrorism, child exploitation and nation-state threat teams at Meta and in government. Founded in 2021 and launched publicly in December 2022, the company raised a $4 million seed and $10 million Series A led by Accel before closing a $41 million Series B led by Radical Ventures, with M12, PSP Growth, Outpost Ventures and Y Combinator also participating. The platform works as a system of record for trust and safety decisions rather than a single classifier. Teams set policy inside Cinder, then route signals through five specialized AI agents (spanning moderation, copyright, fraud and spam) alongside their own classifiers or third-party models, with humans reviewing edge cases inside the same case management interface, so a decision that used to bounce between a spreadsheet and a Slack thread now stays inside one auditable record. Cinder is built for platforms handling large volumes of user-generated content or account activity: frontier AI labs guarding against prompt abuse and generated CSAM, marketplaces and creator platforms fighting fraud and account takeover, and social apps enforcing community policy at scale. Its stated customer base spans over 3 billion protected end users across companies like OpenAI, Spotify, Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, Synthesia, Depop and BeReal. Cinder runs as a web-based platform with no native desktop or mobile app. Beyond the core software, it also offers BPO transition and content moderation services, red-teaming and adversarial testing, and custom expert services that are scoped and billed separately from the platform itself.
Pricing
No public pricing. Cinder is sold through an enterprise sales process with a required demo; deals are scoped by data volume, which AI agent modules a team runs, and whether extras such as a managed BPO transition or a red-teaming engagement are bundled in.
Key Features
- Five specialized AI agents: Cinder ships five pre-built AI agents, ranging from content moderation and IP/copyright enforcement to account fraud, takeover detection and spam triage, and lets teams run them alongside their own classifiers or third-party models.
- Workflows and case management: A drag-and-drop workflow builder routes signals from accounts, content and behavior into cases, aggregating context so reviewers see one contextualized record instead of switching between tools.
- No-code policy management: Teams translate written policy into enforcement logic without writing code, so a policy change can ship the same day the rule changes instead of waiting on an engineering sprint.
- Audit trails and compliance documentation: Every policy update, enforcement decision and agent action is logged with its reasoning, building compliance documentation automatically as the team works instead of after the fact.
- Real-time reporting and analytics: Dashboards track volumes, enforcement decisions, violation trends, agent performance and average handle time in real time, giving trust and safety leads numbers to bring to a board or regulator.
- Human review and quality assurance: A quality assurance module benchmarks human reviewers and AI agents against the same labeled data set so a team can catch policy drift before it compounds across thousands of cases.
- Third-party integrations: Cinder connects to NCMEC, Salesforce and StopNCII alongside a customer's own classifiers, so teams are not locked into detection models built solely by Cinder.
Pros
- Cinder says it has saved customers more than 100,000 hours of manual review time, per its own published platform statistics (not independently audited).
- In a published case study, Synthesia's use of Cinder reported over 97% AI moderation accuracy across more than 11.5 million pieces of reviewed content.
- The customer roster spans frontier AI labs like OpenAI, Midjourney and Black Forest Labs to consumer platforms like Spotify, Depop and BeReal, protecting a stated 3 billion or more end users combined.
- Cinder lets teams bring their own classifiers or third-party models into the same case management workflow as Cinder's own AI agents, avoiding a full rip-and-replace of existing detection tooling.
Cons
- Cinder publishes no self-serve pricing; every deployment starts with a sales demo, which rules out a quick cost comparison for smaller teams evaluating options.
- There is no free trial or self-serve signup, so a team cannot test the platform against its own content before a sales conversation.
- Cinder's headline numbers, like its accuracy and user-protection stats, come from its own case studies and marketing pages rather than an independent audit or a third-party benchmark like G2 or Trustpilot (no listings were found for Cinder on either).
Frequently Asked Questions
How much do you pay for Cinder?
Cinder does not publish self-serve pricing. It sells through an enterprise sales process that requires a demo, and the final price depends on data volume, which of its AI agent modules a team uses, and whether add-on services like BPO moderation transition or red-teaming are included.
Is Cinder free to use?
No. Cinder has no free tier and no self-serve trial; every deployment starts with a sales demo and a custom quote scoped to volume and agent modules. Teams that want to test moderation quality before committing typically raise a pilot or proof-of-concept scope during that sales process.
What should you use instead of Cinder?
Hive Moderation is a developer-friendly, API-first alternative with pre-trained classifiers for nudity, violence and hate symbols if a team wants pay-as-you-go detection rather than a full case-management platform. ActiveFence, rebranded as Alice in 2026, is a closer full-service match for teams that want AI red-teaming and a managed threat-intelligence layer bundled with moderation. Trust Lab is another platform-style competitor worth evaluating for teams comparing case-management depth.
Is Cinder better than Hive Moderation?
Neither is strictly better: Hive Moderation sells developer-friendly, pay-as-you-go classifiers a team calls directly from its own app, while Cinder sells a full case-management platform with policy tooling, human review queues and audit trails built around AI agents. A team that just needs a nudity or violence classifier behind an API is better served by Hive; a team managing full trust and safety operations, casework and compliance reporting is closer to what Cinder is built for.
How long does it take to get going with Cinder?
There is no self-serve signup: a team requests a demo through Cinder's website, and Cinder's team scopes a deployment around the platform's data, existing classifiers and which AI agent modules it needs. Cinder does not publish a typical time-to-launch figure, so teams should ask about onboarding timelines directly during the sales process.