Keeping Users Safe: Musubi’s Origin Story

By Sydney Landau, Shakti

Tom Quisel built a company around the problem he cared most deeply about: online trust and safety. Today Musubi is keeping over 45 million users safe.

As CTO at OkCupid and Grindr, Tom saw the same pattern repeat. Companies were spending millions on human moderation teams tasked with scanning through harassment, scams, and toxicity. Not only was it inefficient, it was taking a serious toll on the people doing it. The job was emotionally draining, full of burnout and turnover. /

And the stakes were only getting higher. With the explosion of user-generated content and the rise of AI-powered threats like deepfakes and scam rings, keeping platforms safe had become an existential challenge.

Tom knew there had to be a better way. But he also knew that ideas alone don’t build companies.

So before launching Musubi, he made sure the foundation was solid: a values-aligned co-founder, a customer who felt the pain deeply, and an investor who believed in the long game.

With that in place, Musubi became real.

SHAKTI portfolio company, Musubi, is an adaptive AI platform for content moderation for marketplaces and social media apps. Musubi helps detect and block harmful content — automating 70–90% of what human moderators do today. But it’s not about replacing people — it’s about making the work more sustainable. Moderators can now focus on the edge cases that require thought and care, while Musubi handles the rest.