Artificial intelligence safety platform startup WitnessAI Inc. today launched as it announced it has raised $27.5 million in funding from GV Management Co. LLC and Ballistic Ventures LLC to accelerate the development of new AI safeguards.

WitnessAI’s path to becoming a venture capital-backed startup isn’t typical as it was founded and incubated in 2023 by Ballistic Ventures. The venture capital firm incubated the company and handpicked its founders to address what it saw as an emerging problem: the need for governance and taking on new security challenges presented by AI.

AI privacy, governance and security are at the core of what WitnessAI offers. The company’s platform seeks to address three core areas cited as being barriers to AI adoption: lack of visibility, control and protection.

WitnessAI says it addresses these challenges to enable the safe and effective use of AI within enterprises. 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.

“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,” said Chief Executive Rick Caccia. “We’ve built something that works in the most demanding environments, including global organizations and across clouds.”

WitnessAI is deployed as an isolated, cloud-based instance for each customer, with each instance encrypted with unique keys to ensure data privacy and regulatory separation. The platform intercepts activity between users and large language models to apply control policies and to ensure data protection and user safety. It does so through an integrated design that includes new techniques in machine learning, offense and defense security for AI activity and enterprise-scale web services deployment.

“WitnessAI will enable enterprises of any size to use AI safely and effectively,” said Barmak Meftah, co-founder and general partner of Ballistic Ventures. “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.”

Image: WitnessAI