Highlights:

  • Protect AI asserts that most firms lack the knowledge and resources to identify dangers and weaknesses in the machine learning supply chain.
  • The AI Radar tool from Protect AI creates an ML Bill of Materials that patches security flaws and identifies threats to stop releasing sensitive information while providing visibility into the machine learning attack surface.

Protect AI Inc., a cybersecurity startup using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, announced that it has raised USD 35 million in new capital to expand its sales and marketing, research and development, go-to-market operations, and customer success efforts.

Former employees of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Oracle Corp. formed the business in 2022. It included Ian Swanson, Chief Executive Officer, who previously served as AWS’s global head of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It provides technologies built to let enterprises observe, understand, and manage their machine learning environments, resulting in safer AI applications.

According to Protect AI, not even the most technologically proficient businesses worldwide maintain a complete inventory of all the resources and components used in their machine learning systems. The sudden increase in supply chain assets, such as external training data sets and core models, causes the problem. Traditional security measures also don’t provide visibility into data pipelines and machine learning systems.

Protect AI asserts that most firms lack the knowledge and resources to identify dangers and weaknesses in the machine learning supply chain. Regulatory non-compliance, data manipulation, model poisoning, personally identifiable data leakages, infrastructure protection, and reputational risk are just a few of the concerns enterprises face due to a lack of expertise and resources.

The AI Radar platform from Protect AI creates an ML Bill of Materials that patches security flaws and identifies threats to stop releasing sensitive information while providing visibility into the machine learning attack surface. Another product, NB Defense, addresses deficiencies in Jupyter Notebooks, an essential part of the machine learning value chain that allows data scientists to create and share documents with software code, equations, and other resources. Jupyter Notebooks are open-source web applications.

Swanson stated, “AI applications are being deployed at an extraordinary and unprecedented rate across all industries and business functions, with virtually no visibility and oversight into the assets being used in their ML systems. Protect AI provides new and innovative solutions, like AI Radar, that enable organizations to build, deploy and manage safer AI by monitoring, detecting, and remediating security vulnerabilities and threats in real-time.”

Evolution Equity Partners LLP led the Series C round with the participation of Acrew Capital LP, Salesforce Ventures LLC, Knollwood Capital LLC, Boldstart Ventures LLC, and Pelion Ventures Partners LLC. With this fresh funding, Protect AI raised USD 48.5 million in capital.