The WitnessAI Secure AI Enablement Platform
provides visibility, control and protection of enterprise AI
usage.
SAN
MATEO, Calif., May 21, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- WitnessAI, creator of the first enablement
platform for safe AI use, today announced a $27.5 million Series A round, co-led by GV and
Ballistic Ventures. The company had previously been incubated by
Ballistic Ventures, beginning in 2023.
WitnessAI is the creator of the first
enablement platform for safe AI use.
Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are seen as a
transformative technology for enabling innovation across every
business function, yet few enterprises have actually adopted it
fully. A recent survey showed that, while 75% of enterprises have
experimented with generative AI, only 9% have actually deployed it
widely. Privacy and governance issues were among the top barriers
cited. Common AI governance issues include:
- Lack of visibility - With new AI chatbots and
projects appearing on the web each day, IT organizations are often
unable to track which AI systems their employees are accessing, and
what employees are doing with those systems. An internal WitnessAI
survey indicated that nearly 90% of CISOs struggle to get a clear
picture of employee AI usage.
- Lack of control - AI presents a new set of privacy
and compliance challenges, such as preventing LLM training data
from one client from being used to serve a different client,
ensuring that employees can't illegally access customer data within
a private LLM, or blocking company IP from being shared with a
public LLM such as ChatGPT.
- Lack of protection - LLMs create a new attack
surface, putting enterprises at risk of data or financial loss.
Prompt injection, jailbreaking and hallucination are a few of the
common security risks from LLMs in use today.
WitnessAI addresses these challenges to enable safe, effective
use of AI within the enterprise. The WitnessAI Secure AI Enablement
Platform includes modules for observability of AI use, policy
enforcement and governance of AI use, and protection of employees,
customers and enterprise data from AI use. The company will begin
early deployments in June 2024 and is
already working with more than 20 design partners across multiple
industries.
"Building a safe AI enablement platform that works at enterprise
scale requires a purpose-built team with expertise in AI and ML,
red and blue teaming, and web-scale platform deployment," said
Rick Caccia, WitnessAI CEO. "We've
built something that works in the most demanding environments,
including global organizations and across clouds. The response from
CISOs we've spoken with has been tremendous."
WitnessAI is deployed as an isolated, cloud-based instance for
each customer, encrypted with their own keys to ensure data privacy
and regulatory separation. The platform intercepts activity between
users and LLMs, applies control policies, and ensures data
protection and user safety – all with millisecond latency and
requiring nothing to be installed on the users' devices. Achieving
this requires an integrated design that blends new techniques in
machine learning, offensive and defense security for AI activity,
and enterprise-scale web services deployment.
"For most enterprises, the AI journey is just beginning," said
Karim Faris, General Partner at GV.
"The need for guardrails around AI use, including visibility and
control of that use, will only grow, and GV is excited to partner
with the WitnessAI team as they make AI safe for the
enterprise."
"WitnessAI will enable enterprises of any size to use AI safely
and effectively," said Barmak
Meftah, Co-founder and General Partner of Ballistic
Ventures. "When major technology shifts occur, they create the
opportunity for someone to build the next great platform, and
WitnessAI is building that new platform for enterprise AI.
Ballistic is proud to have incubated the company from its earliest
days."
The funding will be used to accelerate development of new AI
guardrails and build out a global sales and support organization.
Enterprise leaders interested in a demonstration of the WitnessAI
platform can contact the company at demo@witness.ai.
About WitnessAI
WitnessAI enables safe and effective adoption of enterprise AI,
through security and governance guardrails for public and private
LLMs. The WitnessAI Secure AI Enablement Platform provides
visibility of employee AI use, control of that use via AI-oriented
policy, and protection of that use via data and topic security.
Learn more at https://witness.ai.
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SOURCE WitnessAI