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Redactive AI, a Melbourne-based developer platform, has secured $11.5 million in a seed funding round. The round was co-led by Blackbird and Atlassian Ventures, with additional participation from US firms Felicis and Zapier.
Redactive AI addresses the shortage of AI engineering and security skills within enterprise software teams. The funding will support Redactive AI in developing its responsible AI platform, which helps major corporations utilize generative AI without risking proprietary information.
Redactive AI was founded by former Atlassian product managers Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente and AI engineer Lucas Sargent. The team recognized a gap in the market for AI application development amid the generative AI boom last year. With over five years of experience building developer platforms for Fortune 500 enterprises, they saw the need for a solution addressing the unique security and data privacy challenges large organizations face.
“The open-source community was filled with incredible projects showcasing the potential of next-generation AI,” explained Pankevicius. “However, enterprises with fragmented data repositories and complex security controls would struggle to adopt bespoke generative AI agents and applications without fulfilling their specific security needs.” This insight led to the creation of Redactive AI, a platform designed to meet enterprises’ information security, privacy, and permission access control needs, enabling software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features that can seamlessly pass security reviews and be quickly deployed into production.
Pankevicius emphasized that the team aims to address global AI adoption challenges from their Melbourne base. Redactive AI helps enterprises manage new data threats and empower their security teams.
An Australian superannuation fund and a financial exchange are already using the platform as their preferred responsible AI solution. Unlike solutions that aim to replace software engineers, Redactive AI enhances the emerging and crucial ‘data engineering’ skillset required for AI applications to function effectively.
San Francisco-based workflow automation software company Zapier also values Redactive AI’s approach. Valued at $5 billion in 2021, Zapier emphasizes the importance of real-time data access control for its users. Mike Knoop, Zapier’s co-founder, praised Redactive for its approach that avoids the need for expensive and slow permission synchronization, which is particularly challenging at scale due to the differing permissions of third-party data sources.
Zapier collaborates with Redactive and has invested in it alongside Blackbird Ventures, a leading Australian VC firm known for supporting early-stage founders with ambitious ideas.
Michael Tolo, a general partner at Blackbird, commended Redactive’s rapid acceleration, having been founded just ten months ago. Tolo highlighted that generative AI applications are only as effective as the sensitive, permission data they can access, a challenge Redactive adeptly addresses with its secure Gen AI application.
Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis, also expressed admiration for Redactive’s vision to enable enterprise AI with a strong focus on security and permissions. She noted the demand from large enterprise customers, especially in regulated industries like banking and insurance, for secure AI strategies. Treyger also appreciated the team’s Atlassian background, commercial instincts, and early distribution partnerships with companies like Zapier.
Redactive AI’s platform streamlines information retrieval to personalize generative AI applications using proprietary or customer data. It offers a single API that manages data syncing, document chunking, embedding models, vector stores, and live permission fetching of business data, enabling real-time decision-making.
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