Unit 221B, founded by Lance James, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round to expand its eWitness platform, a tool used by Fortune 500 companies and law enforcement agencies to manage cybercrime intelligence and evidence.
The round was led by J2 Ventures, with participation from Pipeline Capital and other investors. The company said the funding will be used to improve collaboration features for investigators, scale market outreach, and enhance law enforcement’s ability to track and disrupt organized cybercrime groups.
The eWitness platform operates as an invite-only environment for vetted users, including security teams, researchers, journalists, and law enforcement officers. The platform preserves and shares evidence in a legally defensible manner, even when original sources are deleted or removed. More than 50 Fortune 500 companies currently use eWitness, alongside federal, state, and local agencies.
Unit 221B said that eWitness allows investigators to consolidate intelligence from multiple sources, including public reporting, internal security teams, and law enforcement channels, to support ongoing investigations. By providing a centralized environment for evidence management, the platform aims to streamline workflows, ensure consistency across investigative teams, and maintain data integrity that meets legal standards.
Chief Executive Officer May Chen-Contino commented on the platform’s focus, stating, “The problems we’re solving are most acutely how the online threat landscape has evolved, youth that are able to go online and cause very high harm, both in the real world and online world, at a speed and scale that just didn’t exist a few years ago. We’re hyper-focused on that current problem.”
Addressing the Surge in Youth-Led Cybercrime
Over the past several years, English-speaking teenage hacking groups have become a central focus for law enforcement and corporate security teams. These groups operate across online forums, encrypted messaging platforms, and private networks, moving with a speed and coordination that has not been typical of earlier cybercriminal activity. They have been responsible for a wide range of attacks, including ransomware deployments, credential theft, and high-profile breaches affecting multinational corporations.
The MGM Resorts breach, which resulted in an estimated $100 million financial hit according to public filings, stands as one of the most visible examples. Similar incidents targeting cloud services, hotel chains, and technology companies have underscored how quickly these groups can exploit weaknesses and monetize stolen data. The FBI’s most recent Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report put total reported cybercrime losses at more than $12 billion in a single year, with credential theft and ransomware remaining among the top categories.
Unit 221B has gained recognition for directly supporting investigations into groups such as Scattered Spider and The Com. These organizations, composed largely of young hackers, have been linked to breaches that disrupted major enterprises and drew attention from both industry analysts and law enforcement agencies worldwide. The company’s ability to bridge gaps between intelligence gathering, evidence preservation, and case building has helped advance several investigations to the point of arrest and prosecution.
Chief Research Officer Allison Nixon noted the importance of continued focus on these groups, stating, “The Com is likely going to continue to grow in the same trajectory that it has been, and the funding will help the company further its ability to track and help investigators arrest English-speaking threats.”
Integrating Machine Learning and Human Expertise
Unit 221B is enhancing eWitness with machine learning and analytics to help investigators identify patterns, link incidents across targets, and uncover connections that are difficult to detect manually. The platform is designed to accelerate recognition of cross-border activity while maintaining the legal integrity of evidence.
The platform continues to rely on human expertise as its core function. Unit 221B employs forensic analysts, security engineers, and former hackers who guide investigations and build cases. eWitness has been used in investigations contributing to arrests, recovery of stolen funds, and legal proceedings.
The company plans to strengthen partnerships with international Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and law enforcement units, scale data ingestion, and expand collaboration features for investigative teams. These initiatives aim to enable investigators to track, preserve, and act on digital evidence in real time, supporting both corporate security and public safety.
