Virtue AI, a San Francisco startup working on technologies to secure enterprise AI deployments, has banked $30 million in Seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures.
The company, which counts Intel’s new CEO Lip Bu Tan as an early stage investor, is betting on an expanding market for security solutions that allow enterprises to deploy generative AI without compromising security, safety, or privacy.
The company has ambitious plans to sell an enterprise-focused platform to support the assessment, development, and maintenance of safe, secure, and privacy-preserving AI systems.
“The multi-billion dollar AI security market opportunity is expected to expand as agentic deployments proliferate in the enterprise. However, traditional computing security is insufficient for artificial intelligence use cases” Virtue AI said, warning that problems like data poisoning, hallucinations, prompt injections and jailbreaking attempts expose companies to cyberattacks while creating regulatory and compliance challenges.
The company’s product lineup includes VirtueRed, a risk assessment solution for AI models, systems, and agents featuring more than 100 red teaming algorithms and covers more than 320 safety categories that align with regulatory requirements.
VirtueAI said the system is integrated into DevOps workflows to provide consistent, enterprise-grade risk assessments.
The company is also marketing VirtueGuard-Text, a customizable guardrail model focused on long-context text applications; VirtueGuard-Image, a guardrail model developed for image-based AI applications; VirtueGuard-Video, a real-time guardrail model for video applications; and VirtueAgent, customizable AI agents designed with safety and security guarantees.
Virtue AI and the funding will be used on research and development, market expansion and staffing in the areas of AI safety and security.
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