Portal26 Inc., a startup that helps companies protect employees from risky artificial intelligence applications, has raised $9 million in funding.

Shasta Ventures led the Series A investment. It was joined by Fusion Fund and the venture capital arm of an unnamed Fortune 500 financial services firm. Portal26 said in its announcement of the raise today that the proceeds will go toward product development and growth initiatives.

Los Gatos, California-based Portal26 provides a cloud platform that can map out the third-party AI services used by a company’s employees. According to the software maker, its platform highlights applications with inadequate cybersecurity controls. Portal26 also spots other issues, such as services that don’t pose a cybersecurity risk but have regulatory compliance gaps. 

The platform adds information about every new AI application it detects to a centralized database. According to Portal26, that database can help speed up cybersecurity reviews. It doubles as a procurement tool: administrators can use it to check whether workers may have discovered a new AI tool that should be adopted at the organizational level.

Portal26 says that its platform identifies not only what AI applications employees adopt but also how they interact with them. The platform analyzes prompts, attachments and various usage-related metrics. It can stream that data to other cybersecurity tools. 

When Portal26 detects potentially risky activity, it can instruct a company’s firewall to block the affected AI application. It then sends data about the incident to the company’s cybersecurity investigation tool.

Portal26 stores information on users’ interactions with AI applications in what it calls a forensic vault. Companies can use their own encryption keys to protect the contents of the vault. The tool adheres to NIST FIPS, a cybersecurity standard designed to ensure that federal technology systems don’t contain any vulnerabilities.

The company says its forensic vault can streamline cybersecurity investigations by giving administrators access to reliable incident data. It also has other use cases. Companies can, for example, use the data collected by Portal26 to refine their cybersecurity training programs. If the platform shows that the marketing team has started using Sora to generate promotional clips, administrators could add new training materials focused on video models. 

The information gathered by Portal26 is also useful for development teams. They can analyze data on how workers interact with third-party AI tools to inform the development of their own AI applications’ interfaces. 

“Portal26 stands apart from our competitors in both the quality and quantity of customers we have,” said Chief Executive Officer Arti Raman. “A vast majority of these customers have made large multiyear commitments of up to seven figures.”

The startup faces competition from larger market players such as CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., which acquired an AI application governance startup called Pangea Inc. in September. The deal was reportedly worth about $260 million. Pangea offers a browser extension that analyzes the prompts employees enter into AI applications and removes any sensitive business data they may contain. 

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