AI

Protect AI lands a $13.5M investment to harden AI projects from attack

Comment

digital umbrella
Image Credits: Andrzej Wojcicki (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Seeking to bring greater security to AI systems, Protect AI today raised $13.5 million in a seed-funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures with participation from Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures and Aviso Ventures. Ian Swanson, the co-founder and CEO, said that the capital will be put toward product development and customer outreach as Protect AI emerges from stealth.

Protect AI claims to be one of the few security companies focused entirely on developing tools to defend AI systems and machine learning models from exploits. Its product suite aims to help developers identify and fix AI and machine learning security vulnerabilities at various stages of the machine learning life cycle, Swanson explains, including vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive data.

“As machine learning models usage grows exponentially in production use cases, we see AI builders needing products and solutions to make AI systems more secure, while recognizing the unique needs and threats surrounding machine learning code,” Swanson told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We have researched and uncovered unique exploits and provide tools to reduce risk inherent in [machine learning] pipelines.”

Swanson co-launched Protect AI with Daryan Dehghanpisheh and Badar Ahmed roughly a year ago. Swanson and Dehghanpisheh previously worked together at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the AI and machine learning side of the business; Swanson was the worldwide leader at AWS’s AI customer solutions team and Dehghanpisheh was the global leader for machine learning solution architects. Ahmed became acquainted with Swanson while working at Swanson’s last startup, DataScience.com, which was acquired by Oracle in 2017. Ahmed and Swanson worked together at Oracle as well, where Swanson was the VP of AI and machine learning.

Protect AI’s first product, NB Defense, is designed to work within Jupyter Notebook, a digital notebook tool popular among data scientists within the AI community. (A 2018 GitHub analysis found that there were more than 2.5 million public Jupyter Notebooks in use at the time of the report’s publication, a number that’s almost certainly climbed since then.) NB Defense scans Jupyter notebooks for AI projects — which usually contain all the code, libraries and frameworks needed to train, run and test an AI system — for security risks and provides remediation suggestions.

What sort of problematic elements might an AI project notebook contain? Swanson suggests internal-use authentication tokens and other credentials, for one. NB Defense also looks for personally identifiable information (e.g., names and phone numbers) and open source code with a “nonpermissive” license that might prohibit it from being used in a commercial system.

Jupyter Notebooks are typically used as scratchpads rather than production environments, and most are locked safely away from prying eyes. According to an analysis by Dark Reading, fewer than 1% of the approximately 10,000 instances of Jupyter Notebook on the public web are configured for open access. But it’s true the exploits aren’t just theoretical. Last December, security firm Lightspin uncovered a method that could allow an attacker to run any code on a victim’s notebook across accounts on AWS SageMaker, Amazon’s fully managed machine learning service.

Other research firms, including Aqua Security, have found that improperly secured Jupyter Notebooks are vulnerable to Python-based ransomware and cryptocurrency mining attacks. In a 2020 Microsoft survey of businesses using AI, the majority said that they don’t have the right tools in place to secure their machine learning models.

It might be premature to sound the alarm bells. There’s no evidence that attacks are happening at scale, despite a Gartner report predicting an increase in AI cyberattacks through the end of this year. But Swanson makes the case that prevention is key.

“[Many] existing security code scanning solutions are not compatible with Jupyter notebooks. These vulnerabilities, and many more, are due to a lack of focus and innovation from current cybersecurity solution providers, and is the largest differentiation for Protect AI: Real threats and vulnerabilities that exist in AI systems, today,” Swanson said.

Beyond Jupyter Notebooks, Protect AI will work with common AI development tools, including Amazon SageMaker, Azure ML and Google Vertex AI Workbench, Swanson says. It’s available for free to start, with paid options to be introduced in the future.

“Machine learning is … complex and the pipelines delivering machine learning at scale create and multiply cybersecurity blind spots that evade current cybersecurity offerings, preventing important risks from being adequately understood and mitigated. Additionally, emerging compliance and regulatory frameworks continue to advance the need to harden AI systems’ data sources, models, and software supply chain to meet increased governance, risk management and compliance requirement,” Swanson continued. “Protect AI’s unique capabilities and deep expertise in the machine leaning lifecycle for enterprises and AI at scale helps enterprises of all sizes meet today’s and tomorrow’s unique, emerging and increasing requirements for a safer, more secure AI powered digital experience.”

That’s promising a lot. But Protect AI has the advantage of entering a market with relatively few direct competitors. Perhaps the closest is Resistant AI, which is developing AI systems to protect algorithms from automated attacks.

Protect AI, which is pre-revenue, isn’t revealing how many customers it has today. But Swanson claims that the company has secured “enterprises in the Fortune 500” across verticals, including finance, healthcare and life sciences, as well as energy, gaming, digital businesses and fintech.

“As we grow our customers, build partners and value chain participants we will use our funding to add additional team members in software development, engineering, security and go-to-market roles throughout 2023,” Swanson said, adding that Protect AI’s headcount stands at 15. “We have several years of cash runway available to continue to advance this field.”

More TechCrunch

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

5 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time