Runtime artificial intelligence application protection platform startup Operant AI Inc. today announced that it has raised $10 million in new funding to accelerate team and product expansion.

Founded in 2020, Operant AI offers a runtime application protection platform that actively shields live applications from infrastructure to application programming interfaces. The company’s approach brings together live blueprints of every application layer, from processes to services to APIs, while also providing extensive active protection through its Adaptive Internal Firewalls and Proactive Protection Guardrails.

Operant AI’s shielding technology enables security engineers and Ops teams to block over 80% of the Open Web Application Security Project’s top 10 attacks across APIs, large language models and Kubernetes without any instrumentation or application code changes.

The company’s service offers single-step deployment that takes only minutes to get up and running to give security and platform teams real-time visibility and cloud-native protection for their entire cloud application stacks. The result, according to Operant AI, is frictionless security for development, security and ops teams to deploy products and AI faster without security holding them back.

“The fragmented way in which customers have been forced to buy and stitch together a plethora of security tools to achieve basic levels of visibility has become a blocker to responsible application and AI development,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Vrajesh Bhavsar. “That’s why we’re breaking down the traditional barriers between API, cloud and application protection without placing the burden of instrumentation on the customer.”

The service “allows security engineers to fully understand their multidimensional application environments beyond the WAF and within the vibrant and complex internals so that we can work together to actively block so many of the modern attacks that simply can’t be stopped by traditional static or one-dimensional approaches,” Bhavsar added.

The Series A round was led by SineWave Ventures and Felicis Ventures, with Alumni Venture Group, Massive Corporation Inc., Calm Ventures, Gaingels and a number of unnamed angel investors also participating.

“Operant’s unique runtime security solution provides a critical new layer of AI protection, complementing application security programs by preventing the majority of OWASP Top 10 attacks and AI attacks that static analysis tools alone cannot detect,” said Nancy Wang, venture partner at Felicis.

With the new funding, Operant AI has raised $13 million to date.

Image: Operant