Protect AI, a Seattle, WA-based cybersecurity company focused on the security of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, emerged from stealth today with $13.5 million seed funding and its first product, NB Defense.
The round was co-led by Acrew Capital and boldstart ventures, with participation from Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures, Avisio Ventures, and cybersecurity leaders Shlomo Kramer, Nir Polak, and Dimitri Sirota.
“As enterprises put AI/ML in production, it must be protected commensurate with the value it delivers. I have seen more than 100,000 customers deploy AI/ML systems and realized they introduce a new and unique security threat surface that today’s cybersecurity solutions in the market do not address,” said Ian Swanson, co-founder and CEO of Protect AI. “This is why we founded Protect AI. ML developers and security teams need new tools, processes, and methods that secure their AI systems. Since nearly all ML code begins with a notebook, we thought that’s the most logical place to start so that we can accelerate a needed industry transition. We are launching a free product that helps usher in this new category of MLSecOps to build a safer AI-powered world, starting now. But, we have many more innovations that will be released quickly across the entire ML supply chain.”
NB Defense is an industry-first security solution for Jupyter Notebooks. NB Defense creates a translation layer from traditional security capabilities to enable scans of Jupyter Notebooks, then communicates findings back natively in the notebook or via easy-to-read reports with context-specific links to problematic areas within the notebook for remediation.
NB Defense is available today under a free license. Users can easily install NB Defense and use the JupyterLab Extension or Command Line Interface (CLI).
Mark Kraynak and Ed Sim, respectively, join the Protect AI Board of Directors
Company: Protect AI, Inc.
Raised: $13.5.0M
Round: Seed Round
Funding Month: December 2022
Lead Investors: Acrew Capital and boldstart ventures
Additional Investors: Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures, Avisio Ventures, Shlomo Kramer, Nir Polak, and Dimitri Sirota
Company Website: https://protectai.com/
Software Category: AI and ML Systems Security
About the Company: Protect AI is a cybersecurity company focused on the security of AI and ML systems, creating a new category we call MLSecOps. Its offerings help enterprises easily secure and better govern AI and ML systems, resulting in more trusted artificial intelligence. It performs security scans on the ML lifecycle and helps deliver secure and compliant ML models and AI applications. Protect AI has 15 employees and is based in Seattle, Washington, with offices in Dallas and Raleigh.
Source: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221215005356/en/Protect-AI-Secures-13.5M-Seed-Funding-to-Further-MLSecOps