Pangram
New York company, also called Pangram Labs, that builds detectors for AI-generated text and images. It announced a USD 9 million round led by Menlo Ventures in July 2026.
Industry: AI-generated content detection | Location: New York, United States | Founded: 2023 | Total Funding: USD 13M
About Pangram
Pangram, operating as Pangram Labs, is a New York startup that builds tools to tell human-written content from AI-generated content. It was founded by Stanford classmates Max Spero, the chief executive, and Bradley Emi, the chief technology officer. Sources differ on whether it was founded in 2023 or 2024. Its main product is a text detector, and the company has also put an image detector into preview. The detector is offered as a web app, a Chrome extension, integrations with learning-management systems such as Google Classroom, Canvas, Brightspace and Moodle, and a REST API. Individuals pay about USD 20 a month for the service, and platform deals form the more significant part of the business. Quora was an early customer, and Substack uses Pangram to let readers filter out AI-generated posts. The company says it trained a large model on tens of millions of documents written by people. For each one it created what it calls a synthetic mirror: a text on the same topic, of roughly the same length and tone, written by a top-tier language model. Learning from both versions, the model picks up the stylistic habits of AI writing. The approach relies on style rather than metadata or watermarks. Pangram quotes accuracy above 99 percent and a false-positive rate of one in 10,000, figures that are the company's own, and stresses the latter because wrongly accusing a real author is the failure that matters most in classrooms and newsrooms. Pangram closed a pre-seed and seed round of about USD 4 million in June 2025, with ScOp Venture Capital and Haystack among the investors. On 29 July 2026 it announced a USD 9 million round led by Menlo Ventures through its Anthology Fund, with Haystack, ScOp Venture Capital, Script Capital and Cadenza participating. Total funding is almost USD 13 million. The round was announced alongside the release of Pangram 4, a text model that the company says handles fully AI-generated, AI-assisted and mixed human-and-AI writing, and Pangram Image, an image detector with a reported 99.5 percent accuracy on internal benchmarks. No valuation was disclosed. Menlo's Deedy Das described AI detection as a universal need and wrote that Spero and Emi had turned down requests to build a tool to help users evade detection. Spero has said the goal is to help publishers, teachers and journalists understand who wrote something. Mixed human-and-AI writing remains the hardest case for the model, and detection is an arms race against ever more evasive generation. Detection tools for Arabic lag those for English, though no Pangram activity in the Gulf has been reported.
Leadership
- Max Spero, Founder
- Bradley Emi, Co-founder and CTO
- Max Spero, Founder