Bedrock Labs Inc., a data security startup that likes to be known simply as Bedrock Security, said today it has closed on a $10 million seed funding round led by Greylock. The round came as the company announced the launch of its “frictionless data security” platform that’s said to help companies by continuously discovering, managing and protecting their most sensitive information.

The startup said its data security platform is powered by an industry-first AI Reasoning Engine, which relies on artificial intelligence to automatically understand what new data means to a company. By understanding the importance of new data the moment it is generated, Bedrock Security says it can help companies to protect their most valuable assets without disrupting their business operations. Most importantly, it also provides strong protection for organizations working with generative AI models, with various capabilities that ensures those algorithms cannot access sensitive information.

The AIR Engine enables companies of all sizes and in any industry to secure confidential data and manage the associated risk in an automated way. The idea is to help organizations create a robust data security program from the ground up, which is an essential requirement amid the exponential growth in “big data.”

Bedrock Security says its AIR Engine uses AI-powered reasoning to improve data visibility, going beyond the fixed rules associated with data discovery, classification and mapping. It enables data classifications that weren’t possible with rules-based systems, with its ability to perform data similarity identification, topic detection and identity and activity analysis. This approach, which can be extended to data that’s used to train generative AI models, provides companies with a clear picture of data usage and the associated risk involved with that information.

In addition, the AIR Engine allows for superior data detection and response. Using its data security platform, companies can set up various parameters that ring-fence regulated data and core intellectual property to ensure that it’s never used by generative AI models and other high-risk workloads.

Finally, Bedrock says AIR Engine enables organizations to minimize their data’s risk surface. Utilizing impact and risk analysis, the AIR Engine helps users to reduce identity overprovisioning for data access, minimize stale data and track and contain IP. The startup says this will be essential for companies using generative AI, as it can automatically track IP and its derivative data to ensure it isn’t being leaked to AI models.

Bedrock Security co-founder and Chief Executive Pranava Adduri said he built Bedrock on the basic premise that data is foundational to business growth, especially in the age of generative AI. Given the crucial importance of data, organizations need a way to understand this information quickly and at scale, he said.

“Modern LLM architectures like Retrieval Augmentation Generation ingest a large volume and variety of data very quickly,” he explained. “Bedrock, unlike legacy solutions, can effectively ensure protected information such as regulated data and core IP, is not ingested into these AI models.”

AI paves the way for numerous kinds of automation, but few opportunities are more promising than its ability to understand and obtain insights from enterprise data, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc.

“With petabytes of data being cataloged by humans, there is an ample body of information available that can be used to train AI and make manual classification and tagging tasks a thing of the past,” the analyst said. “With automation, we can eliminate drudgery, human error and more, overcoming human skill limitations too. It’s good to see this area of data automation getting more funding, and we will soon see how Bedrock Security can improve on these processes.”

Greylock said it’s investing in Bedrock Security thanks to its ambition of creating a new industry standard around the concept of frictionless data security. It’s a vision that will enable enterprises to simply get to work with their data, safe in the knowledge that it’s well-protected from the moment it’s first created.

The funds from today’s round will help to accelerate the development of Bedrock Security’s platform and ensure it meets the demands of modern organizations that want to safely implement generative AI and other data-based workloads.

Image: Bedrock Security