WitnessAI, a creator of an enablement platform for safe AI use, announced a $27.5 million Series A round co-led by GV and Ballistic Ventures. Ballistic Ventures previously incubated the company.
AI presents a new set of privacy and compliance challenges like preventing LLM training data from one client from being used to serve a different client, ensuring that employees can’t illegally access customer data within a private LLM, or blocking company IP from being shared with a public LLM like ChatGPT. And LLMs create a new attack surface, putting enterprises at risk of data or financial loss. Prompt injection, jailbreaking, and hallucination are a few of the common security risks from LLMs being used today.
WitnessAI addresses these challenges to enable the safe and effective use of AI within the enterprise. And the WitnessAI Secure AI Enablement Platform includes modules for observability of AI use, policy enforcement and governance of AI use, and protection of employees, customers and enterprise data from AI use. The company will start early deployments in June 2024 and is already working with more than 20 design partners across multiple industries.
WitnessAI was deployed as an isolated and cloud-based instance for each customer, encrypted with their own keys to ensure data privacy and regulatory separation. The platform intercepts activity between users and LLMs, applies control policies, and ensures data protection and user safety—all with millisecond latency and requiring nothing to be installed on users’ devices. Achieving this requires an integrated design that blends new techniques in machine learning, offensive and defense security for AI activity, and enterprise-scale web services deployment.
This funding round will accelerate the development of new AI guardrails and build out a global sales and support organization.
KEY QUOTES:
“Building a safe AI enablement platform that works at enterprise scale requires a purpose-built team with expertise in AI and ML, red and blue teaming, and web-scale platform deployment. We’ve built something that works in the most demanding environments, including global organizations and across clouds. The response from CISOs we’ve spoken with has been tremendous.”
– Rick Caccia, WitnessAI CEO
“For most enterprises, the AI journey is just beginning. The need for guardrails around AI use, including visibility and control of that use, will only grow, and GV is excited to partner with the WitnessAI team as they make AI safe for the enterprise.”
– Karim Faris, General Partner at GV
“WitnessAI will enable enterprises of any size to use AI safely and effectively. When major technology shifts occur, they create the opportunity for someone to build the next great platform, and WitnessAI is building that new platform for enterprise AI. Ballistic is proud to have incubated the company from its earliest days.”
– Barmak Meftah, Co-founder and General Partner of Ballistic Ventures
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