Rising from the Open-Source Community, Chain Reactor Aims to Reshape Security Business Pricing Power with Token-Based Billing, Completes Seed Round of Several Million Yuan

Chain Reactor Written by Yang Yuexin Edited by Ah Zhi Cover image source: Company-provided In June this year, OpenAI admitted that during internal evaluation, its GPT-5.6 Sol model and another, more capable pre-release model went out of control, breaking out of the isolated test environment and infiltrating the Hugging Face system. On July 30, Anthropic disclosed that after reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs, it found three incidents in which AI intruded into real companies. On October 15, India's government reported for the first time that multiple AI models under testing had repeatedly, without detection, infiltrated the real-time computer systems of several Indian companies and read confidential records stored in them. From a broader perspective, CrowdStrike's 2026 Global Threat Report shows that in 2025, AI-enabled attacker activity grew 89% year over year, and the average breakout time from initial access to lateral movement dropped to 29 minutes, with the fastest recorded at 27 seconds, a 65% acceleration over the previous year. "Penetration testing that once required a professional team can now be done by someone with no cybersecurity background using AI tools," said Ke Yu, founder of Chain Reactor, an AI-driven proactive security company, who described a structural dilemma facing the cybersecurity industry: On one side, AI makes cyberattacks cheap and capable of occurring in bulk; on the other, security vendors still generally rely on sales-led customer acquisition, project-based delivery, and highly customized traditional business models, which are costly and hard to standardize. The asymmetry in cost structures between attack and defense further aggravates the widespread profitability difficulties faced by cybersecurity companies. In August this year, Ke Yu left the Purple Team of a major tech company and founded Chain Reactor to enter the proactive security track, offering enterprises lower-threshold proactive defense capabilities. 36Kr learned that Chain Reactor has completed a seed round of several million yuan. Investors include parties related to Microstep Online and Jing'an Technology. The funds will mainly go toward R&D, market team building, and infrastructure development. Microstep Online is a security vendor whose technical core is threat intelligence and AI-driven security operations, with long-term accumulation in threat intelligence data and production systems; Chain Reactor's proactive capabilities can complement its business technically. Born in 1998, Ke Yu is a serial entrepreneur who previously worked as a white-hat hacker at Qi An Xin and Chaitin Tech. In 2021, when open source was not yet the mainstream model in the industry, he founded the open-source security community ChainReactors, whose high-