Emphere, a Seattle cybersecurity startup building an AI-driven vulnerability remediation platform, this week announced raising $2.1 million in pre-seed funding from AI2 Incubator and Outsiders Fund.
The startup’s approach to vulnerability remediation falls in line with modern software development trends, where code is no longer built from scratch but assembled from open source packages, runtimes, dependencies, and OS layers.
Any vulnerability in these components, Emphere says, is the shipping company’s or the vendor’s problem, even if they did not write a single line of code.
The startup aims to resolve the infrastructure problem of addressing the discovered security defects without breaking something downstream or getting blocked by security tools.
Emphere‘s AI platform analyzes the software dependency graph to understand what is exploitable and applies bug fixes automatically.
What the startup’s solution brings to the table is not automation but the ability to understand dependencies and make confident, safe remediation possible at scale. It executes patches, validates them, and ships results, Emphere says.
“Security got very good at finding the problem. Remediation is where teams are drowning. The volume has crossed a threshold where manual processes simply stop working, and AI is finally capable enough to do something about it,” said Emphere co-founder and CEO Ankit Kumar.
Emphere will use the early-stage investment to accelerate the development of its AI-powered platform and grow its customer base, focusing on software companies looking to deliver faster releases.
In the long term, the company wants to grow its platform to cover the entire surface of modern software development.
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