Following the closing of its $10 million round early this year, Lakera has kicked-off operations to empowers developers with 30 million+ AI attack data points to instantly secure generative AI applications in the enterprise. Its customer base spans Fortune 500 companies, leading LLM providers like Cohere, plus startups and scaleups integrating LLMs into their systems.
After a decade developing machine learning systems for aerospace and healthcare, Lakera co-founders David Haber, Matthias Kraft and Mateo Rojas-Carulla saw the rapid rise of large language model (LLMs) and knew existing enterprise security solutions would not accommodate the unique needs of AI. They launched Lakera to fill this gap. In August 2023, Lakera released the beta version of its latest product, Lakera Guard, to meet the urgent demand for a solution that protected LLMs in production. Lakera Guard has since equipped thousands of developers globally to initiate the secure development of AI applications.
Lakera Guard is powered by a proprietary database that combines crowdsourced insights from Gandalf, Lakera’s viral AI education game played by over half a million users, with open source databases and its own dedicated research. Lakera’s database has amassed nearly 30 million attack data points and is growing by 100k+ entries every day. Lakera Guard empowers developers to activate this vulnerability data with one line of code, instantly embedding a security layer into AI applications in production.
The solution is LLM agnostic and currently focuses on securing Q&A use cases by protecting against prompt injections (including jailbreaks, escape characters, role play and system prompt leakage), PII detection and masking, content moderation, and hallucinations. Additional use cases, including support for autonomous LLM agents, are expected in the coming months.
“When you build AI for airplanes and healthcare, high security standards become baked into everything you do. For AI to reach its full potential, we need these same high standards applied in the enterprise,” said David Haber, Founder and CEO of Lakera. “Developers have a huge role to play in the AI era. AI security has to be incorporated into the development lifecycle. Enterprise developers need an intelligent compute layer embedded in AI applications to ensure protection over time. That’s what Lakera delivers.”
USD 10 million round
The Zurich-based startup raised $10 million in financing earlier this year led by Redalpine. Additional investors Fly Ventures, and Inovia Capital, and angels including the co-founders of Snyk, the CISO at Palo Alto Networks, an SVP at Datadog, and the former CEO at Hybris Ariel Lüdi.
“AI presents security risks unlike anything we’ve seen before. Every organization looking to leverage AI will have to navigate this new threat landscape,” said Harald Nieder, General Partner at Redalpine. “This is one of the most experienced teams in AI with a treasure trove of vulnerability data. Their developer-first approach provides the missing link for all enterprises to deploy AI models with confidence."
To try out Lakera Guard today for free, click here. For more information on Lakera, visit Lakera.ai.
(Press release/RAN)
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