Australian artificial intelligence engineering and security development startup Redactive Software Pty. Ltd. today announced that it has raised $7.5 million in new funding to grow its headcount, increase marketing efforts and to expand into the U.S.

Founded in 2023 by Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, both former Atlassian Corp. product managers and Lucas Sargent, a previously self-employed machine learning engineer, Redactive is building a developer platform that aims to solve issues surrounding AI engineering and security skill sets in enterprise software teams.

“Redactive started with a question,” Pankevicius said. “What if we considered the information security, privacy and permissioned access control needs of an enterprise first and reversed that out into a simple to adopt developer platform for software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features or products that can seamlessly get through information security reviews and truly make their way into production quickly?”

Redactive’s platform is designed to simplify information retrieval needed to personalize generative AI applications with proprietary or customer data. The company offers an application programming interface that handles data syncing, document chunking, embedding models, vector stores and live permissioned fetching of business data.

Offering what it calls a “virtual AI engineer,” the platform removes the specialist data engineering knowledge that developers need to learn, implement and maintain to build scalable and secure AI-enhanced applications for customers or productivity use cases.

Redactive claims to be the only developer platform that solves the issue of missing AI engineering and security skills within enterprise software engineering teams. It does so by equipping enterprises with technology that can navigate strict security requirements and connect to fragmented data sources to reliably and safely ship bespoke generative AI applications into production.

While relatively young, Redactive said it’s seeing solid growth from large enterprises looking to take advantage of the productivity benefits of Generative AI while ensuring their security, data flows and intellectual property remain their own. In Australia, Redactive counts two large financial services institutions among its customers.

Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures Pty. Ltd. led the seed round, with Atlassian Ventures LLC and Zapier Inc. also participating.

“We see significant market pull from large enterprise customers, especially banks, insurance companies and other companies in regulated industries, to build their AI strategy in a secure way,” said Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis. “We also loved the Atlassian DNA of the team, commercial instincts and distribution relationships with Zapier and other partners so early in Redactive’s life stage.”

Image: Redactive