Benji Loney

Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer TrustLab

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Benji Loney is a co-founder and the Chief Product Officer of TrustLab, which he started in 2020 with Tom Siegel and Shankar Ponnekanti. The three of them represent an unusually concentrated body of experience: Siegel built Google’s first trust and safety team in the early 2000s, Ponnekanti led YouTube’s brand safety and suitability work, and Loney built and ran trust and safety operations at YouTube and then at TikTok, working through violent extremism and child safety crises, before leading technical strategy at Reddit. TrustLab exists because the capability they each built in-house at the largest platforms is out of reach for everyone else. Its products — DetectAI for identifying harmful content and bad actors, ModAI for moderation — combine machine classification with human review, and the company has deliberately pushed beyond social platforms into marketplaces, legal, financial services, e-commerce and copyright enforcement. Its most consequential work is arguably regulatory rather than commercial: the European Commission selected TrustLab to independently design the measurement methodology and run the analysis for the first structured reporting under its Code of Practice on Disinformation, making the company a measurement authority rather than only a vendor.

Career Highlights

• Built and directed trust and safety operations at YouTube.
• Built and directed trust and safety operations at TikTok, working through major crises including violent extremism and child safety.
• Led technical strategy at Reddit, including internationalisation and the platform’s pandemic response.
• Co-founded TrustLab in 2020 with Tom Siegel, who founded Google’s first trust and safety team, and Shankar Ponnekanti, who led YouTube’s brand safety and suitability efforts.
• Serves as Chief Product Officer, responsible for DetectAI and ModAI.
• Built TrustLab’s products on an AI-with-human-in-the-loop model rather than pure automation.
• TrustLab raised a $15m Series A announced 15 June 2023, led by U.S. Venture Partners and Foundation Capital.
• Counts the European Commission and In-Q-Tel among TrustLab’s customers, alongside social media companies, messaging platforms and marketplaces.
• TrustLab was selected by the European Commission to independently develop the methodology and conduct the analysis for the first structured study under its Code of Practice on Disinformation, published September 2023.
• That 71-page study covered Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube across Poland, Slovakia and Spain, measuring both prevalence and sources of disinformation.
• Published TrustLab’s Online Safety Report 2024.
• Extended the company’s markets to social marketplaces, legal firms, financial services, e-commerce platforms and copyright holders.
• Built a distributed team with people in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Berlin, Ankara and Buenos Aires.

Professional Journey

Loney’s career was made inside the platforms whose failures created the market he now sells into. At YouTube he built and directed trust and safety operations, then did the same at TikTok, and TrustLab’s own account is blunt about what that involved: navigating major crises including extremism and child safety. These are the hardest problems in the field, where the volume is enormous, the stakes are legal and human rather than reputational, and no purely automated system is adequate. He subsequently led technical strategy at Reddit, covering the platform’s internationalisation and its pandemic-era response.

The insight behind TrustLab follows directly from that experience. The largest platforms each built their own trust and safety infrastructure from scratch, at great expense, and everyone else — marketplaces, messaging apps, financial services, e-commerce sites — faces structurally similar problems without the means to solve them. Loney co-founded the company in 2020 with Tom Siegel, who had founded and scaled Google’s trust and safety function, and Shankar Ponnekanti, who had led brand safety and suitability at YouTube. Between them the founding team had run the function at Google, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit.

As Chief Product Officer, Loney is responsible for turning that operational experience into products. TrustLab’s two are DetectAI, which identifies harmful content and bad actors by classifying signals from the open web and detecting trends, and ModAI for moderation itself. Both are built explicitly as AI with a human in the loop, which reflects hard-won knowledge rather than caution: automated classification at scale produces errors that matter enormously in exactly the categories — child safety, extremism — that the founders spent their careers on.

The company raised a $15m Series A announced on 15 June 2023, led by U.S. Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. Its customer base by then already included the European Commission and In-Q-Tel, the venture firm affiliated with the US intelligence community, alongside social media companies, messaging platforms and marketplaces.

The European Commission work is the most externally visible of these. Under the Code of Practice on Disinformation — described as the world’s first self-regulatory instrument of its kind — the Commission selected TrustLab to independently develop the measurement methodology and carry out the analysis. The resulting 71-page study, published in September 2023, measured both the prevalence and the sources of disinformation across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube in Poland, Slovakia and Spain, finding among other things that Twitter had both the highest discoverability of disinformation and the largest proportion of disinformation actors, while YouTube had the lowest on both measures. Siegel’s framing of the exercise — that you cannot manage what you cannot measure — is the strategic case for the whole company.

TrustLab has since published an Online Safety Report for 2024, runs the Click to Trust podcast, and widened its addressable market well past social platforms into legal, financial services, e-commerce and copyright enforcement, operating with a distributed team across the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Berlin, Ankara and Buenos Aires.

Education

No education could be established for Benji Loney from any source in this review, including TrustLab’s own site, funding coverage and third-party directories. None is asserted.