Protect AI, an AI and machine learning security company, has successfully raised $35 million in a Series A funding round led by Evolution Equity Partners. Salesforce Ventures and existing investors, including Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital, and Pelion Ventures, also participated in the funding. With this round, the company has raised a total of $48.5 million to date. The funding will be utilized to expand sales and marketing efforts, accelerate go-to-market activities, invest in research and development, and enhance customer success initiatives.
Protect AI focuses on securing AI systems and ML applications from unique security vulnerabilities, data breaches, and emerging threats. Their platform, AI Radar, aids organizations in building safer AI by providing developers, ML engineers, and AppSec professionals with visibility and oversight into their ML environments. This empowers customers to identify and remediate risks, ensuring a strong security posture for their ML systems and AI applications.
Richard Seewald, Founder and Managing Partner at Evolution Equity Partners, joins the Protect AI Board of Directors, contributing his extensive experience in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and data analytics. The company’s founders have significant expertise in managing large AI/ML businesses for AWS and Oracle, and the firm assembles a highly accomplished team.
Protect AI addresses a critical challenge in AI/ML security, as existing cybersecurity vendors lack solutions for this specific problem. The explosive growth of supply chain assets, such as foundational models and third-party training data sets, combined with the dynamic nature of ML systems and data workflows, creates unique security challenges. Many organizations lack the skills and resources to detect threats and vulnerabilities in the ML supply chain, leading to risks related to regulatory compliance, data breaches, model poisoning, and more.
AI applications are rapidly being deployed across various industries and functions, necessitating robust security measures. Protect AI’s innovative solutions, such as AI Radar, offer real-time monitoring, detection, and remediation of security vulnerabilities and threats, making it a valuable asset in the evolving AI landscape.
