Virtue AI, a new AI startup focusing on AI safety and security, has come out of stealth for $30 million with seed and Series A funding combined. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with backers including Prosperity7 and Factory, Osage University Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, Amarjit Gill and Stanford Professor Chris Re.
The company is built around simple missions. Help businesses adopt generated AI without the usual security headaches. In many cases, businesses are forced to quickly choose to maintain shipping and safety. Virtue Ai wants to end that trade-off.
Virtue AI was founded by Bo Li, Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin and Sanmi Koyejo. This is a team of respected academics with decades of experience in AI research, focusing specifically on safety and security. Over the years, they have witnessed nasty patterns throughout the industry. Companies brought AI products to the market, embracing the risk or stalling innovation with outdated, manual safeguards.
After seeing too many preventable security obstacles in real-world deployments, they tried to change it. Build virtue ai to turn deep expertise into practical tools that help businesses move faster without compromising safety. The gap has led to virtue AI.
Startups have a big bet on the idea that traditional cybersecurity approaches won’t cut it for AI. As businesses begin to connect their generative models to real products and workflows, threats begin to stack up, from rapid injection attacks to data leaks and jailbreak attempts. And as AI becomes central to the way businesses operate, regulators look closely.
“We saw companies struggling with the same challenges over and over, including subpal evaluation methods, inefficient guardrails, and manual processes that created bottlenecks in AI deployment pipelines,” said Bo Li, co-founder and CEO of Virty AI. “Our team has devoted decades to solving these exact problems. Virtue AI transforms its expertise into a practical solution that eliminates the false choice between innovation and safety.”
At the heart of AI platforms are three key tools built to address the most pressing security challenges companies face with generated AI.
The first is an automated red teaming system that handles tests across more than 320 risk categories, including hallucinations, privacy leaks, jailbreaks, and rapid infusions. By moving away from manual testing, what was assumed significantly reduces both the cost and time required to assess the vulnerability of the model.
Next is VirtueGuard, a set of high-performance guardrail models that work with text, images, audio, video and code in over 90 languages. The company says these models aren’t just fast. It is 30 times faster than existing solutions and offers up to 50% performance when it comes to filtering risky or unnecessary outputs.
Finishing the stack is Virtueagent, an AI security agent built to understand an organization’s internal security policies and external regulatory obligations. Automate what is often a boring manual process and helps businesses meet compliance requirements without slowing down the development cycle.
Together, these tools form the foundation of the mission of Virtue AI. Help your business deploy the generated AI responsibly without compromising speed or safety.
The company’s technology is based on academic research recognized by the NSA. This includes widely cited papers that help expose core risks in the underlying model.
It didn’t take long to gain traction. Since its launch, Virtue AI says it has already secured several major enterprise clients.
One of them is Uber. Kai Wang, Group Product Manager for Uber’s AI Platforms, said: “We have worked closely with Virtue AI to implement robust content safety guard rails in our Gen AI applications.
Glean CEO Arvind Jain reiterated the sentiment. “At GLEAN, we are committed to building AI that our organizations can trust. It is safe, reliable and enterprise-ready. Every company has its own security requirements and we strongly believe in providing the flexibility to choose to collaborate with virtue AI.
Investors are clearly buying.
“Virtual AI is shaping the future of Genai Security,” said Lip-Bu Tan, founding managing partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures. “By combining basic research with advanced algorithms, Virtue AI is tackling the most important vulnerabilities of AI systems head-on. Disruptive technology and impressive market traction illustrate the potential for redefine how organizations around the world approach AI safety and security.”
Guru Chahal and James Alcorn of Lightspeed added: “Based on its co-founder’s basic AI safety research, Virtue AI has established its leadership position above the rapidly growing AI Red-Teaming and Guardrails category.
The company plans to use the funds to build a platform, expand its customer base and introduce more AI safety talent.
For spaces filled with hype, Virtue AI focuses on what could be one of the most important parts of the puzzle. This means that AI is safe, easy to use, without complying, and without slowing down your team.
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