San Francisco-based BeeKeeperAI has raised $12.1 million in Series A funding for a secure collaboration platform designed for AI development on healthcare and other sensitive data.
BeeKeeperAI has created what it describes as a zero trust collaboration platform that enables AI developers to work with the stewards of privacy-protected data, such as healthcare information.
The company’s EscrowAI product integrates with Microsoft Azure confidential computing and enables HIPAA-compliant research on sensitive patient data.
AI algorithm owners can submit their work to the BeeKeeper platform and it gets wrapped in a secure computing container that is sent to the sensitive data owner’s environment. The sensitive data is also added to a secure environment and the two are brought together.
A report that is generated as a result of the AI algorithm running against the data is the only information exiting the secure environments, which are destroyed after the job has been completed. The report provides information on the performance of the algorithm and the general characteristics of the data.
“The platform leverages a hardware-based secure enclave environment to bring together the encrypted data and algorithm where they unencrypt in protected memory and execute the computation. Only a predetermined output is allowed out of the enclave,” BeeKeeperAI explained.
The funding round was led by Sante Ventures, with participation from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, AIX Ventures, Continuum Health Ventures, TA Group Holdings, and UCSF. The investment will be used to improve the company’s platform and to expand commercial operations.
SecurityWeek reported after the RSA Conference announced the winner of its 2023 Innovation Sandbox that cybersecurity investors have started pivoting to safeguarding AI training models.
Predictions made at the time by SecurityWeek editor-at-large Ryan Naraine are coming true. This week, Patented.ai and CalypsoAI, both specializing in AI-related security, announced funding rounds.
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