Protect AI, a Seattle-based cybersecurity startup, has closed its new $60 million funding round, which gives the company a $400 million post-money valuation. The Series B funding was supported by Evolution Equity Partners which also took the lead in the $35 million Series A funding launched a year ago. Protect AI’s mission is to assist organizations in overseeing and safeguarding their Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
Funding and Founding Team
The recent $60 million funding round includes investors like 01 Advisors, StepStone Group, Samsung, Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. Protect AI was founded in 2022, and the founding members were the engineering leaders from Amazon and Oracle. With prior experience at Sometrics and DataScience, the CEO and co-founder of the company is Ian Swanson. undefined Two former engineering leaders, Badar Ahmed and Daryan Dehghanpisheh are key contributors to the company’s success.
Protect AI Offer
The Protect AI startup offers five solutions aimed at protecting ML and AI applications against security threats, data leaks, and new risks. With AI being implemented universally in various sectors, companies must emphasize the importance of security systems. Protect AI meets a demand that most traditional security providers cannot; safeguarding ML and AI systems. The latest funding round will allow Protect AI to expand its sales and marketing operations, research and development, and customer success activities. It has a team of 75 people in Seattle, Berlin, and Bangalore, and the plan is to hire 50 more people this year.
Key Features of Protect AI’s Products
Protect AI owns a product line that can be used to protect machine learning and artificial intelligence models. Protect AI which sustainably checks ML models in production. It monitors for drifts as well as performance decline and is used to make sure that models are reliable and secure. The platform can point out security threats associated with ML and AI including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, and model inversion attacks. It can send real-time alerts and control and prevention measures.
Protect AI also assists in explaining the decisions made by ML models when it comes to data protection. It also provides ways to check the bias in the model predictions and ensures that the models act fairly. The startup maintains adherence to privacy standards (for example, GDPR) by anonymizing the data, controlling model usage, and monitoring its behavior. Prevent AI scans ML pipelines for threats such as insecure API, unpatched libraries, and misconfigured resources.
Industries that can benefit from using Protect AI’s Products
Protect AI’s products will be useful across a broad spectrum of markets. Artificial intelligence is significantly used in the financial sector in areas of risk management, fraud detection, credit scoring, and algorithmic trading. Protect AI addresses the safety and reliability of these important systems. The healthcare industry incorporates ML models for the detection, tracking, and development of medications. Protect AI also helps protect patient data while building the reliability of models. Use cases include recommendation systems, inventory management, and marketing campaigns are popular in the retail industry. Secure These applications are shielded by AI safeguards.
AI enhances productivity by improving manufacturing methods, product quality, and supply chain management. Protect AI is designed to safeguard these AI-based systems. The security measures offered by Protect AI are useful for tech companies that use ML models in their software products and cloud services, as well as in cybersecurity. AI is at the heart of self-driving vehicles, traffic forecasts, and supply chain management. Protect AI can assist in avoiding these risks in safety-critical applications. AI helps improve energy conservation, and grid integration, as well as the prediction of equipment failure. Guard AI maintains its stability.
Conclusion
The mission of Protect AI to safeguard AI systems corresponds to the emerging need for robust and inclusive cybersecurity solutions in the sphere of AI. Thus, as the company grows further, it keeps on protecting organizations’ key ML and AI resources.
