Virtue AI, a company founded by world-leading experts in AI safety and security, announced $30 million in Seed and Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures, featuring Prosperity7 and other existing investors including Factory, Osage University Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, Amarjit Gill and Chris Re.
This funding promotes the virtue AI goal of eliminating the traditional trade-off between AI innovation and security, allowing businesses to deploy AI with confidence without worrying about security, safety or compliance.
Virtue AI was created from key insights shared by the founding team of AI Pioneers, Bo Li, Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin and Sanmi Koyejo. After contributing over 80 years of basic research into AI safety and security, they have witnessed first-hand how companies can either be forced to move quickly with increased risk or implement troublesome safety measures that dramatically slow innovation.
Traditional computing security is not sufficient for AI use cases. And as AI transforms industry, organizations face major deployment risks from data addiction and hallucinations, prompting injections and invasion attempts. These vulnerabilities expose businesses to cyberattacks while creating regulatory and compliance challenges.
Virtue AI’s comprehensive platform offers integrated solutions that are several orders of magnitude more than existing alternatives, including:
1.) Virtuered – an algorithmic (not human-based) red teaming platform that covers over 320 regulatory and use case-based risk categories, including hallucinations, privacy leaks, jailbreaks, and rapid injections.
2.) VirtueGuard – Guardrail model over 30 times faster than the alternative, while providing 40-50% performance between text, images, audio, video and code in over 90 languages.
3.) Virtueagent – Security agents automatically interpret internal enterprise security requirements, policies and regulations, eliminating boring manual processes.
The company’s technology is also directly built on groundbreaking research recognized by the National Security Agency (NSA), including inventive papers by co-founders addressing multiple vulnerabilities in the underlying model. And this technical advantage drives the recruitment of amazing customers. Virtue AI has secured the highest-tier enterprise customers in just a few months since its launch.
With this new funding, Virtue AI will promote AI safety personnel who are committed to expanding its platform capabilities, strengthening the market presence and enabling responsible AI deployments around the world.
Important Quotes:
“We have seen companies struggling repeatedly with the same challenges, including subpal evaluation methods, inefficient guardrails, and manual processes to create bottlenecks in AI deployment pipelines. Our team has devoted decades to solving these exact problems.
– Bo Li, co-founder and CEO of Virtue AI
“Uber leverages generator AI to provide magical experiences to end users. We work closely with Virty AI to implement robust content safety guard rails in our GenAI applications, ensuring we are safe, responsible and in line with community standards.”
– Kai Wang, Uber, Group Product Manager, AI Platform
“At GLEAN, we are committed to building AI that organizations can trust, reliable, reliable, and enterprise-ready. We strongly believe in every company having their own security requirements and providing the flexibility to choose their needs and the best approach.
– Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean
“Virtue AI is shaping the future of Genai Security. Combining basic research and advanced algorithms, Virtue AI addresses the most important vulnerabilities of AI systems. Disruptive technology and impressive market traction illustrate the potential of redefine how organizations around the world approach AI safety and security.”
– Lip-Bu Tan, founding and managing partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures
“Built on the basic AI safety research of our co-founders, Virtue AI has quickly established its leadership position on top of the rapidly growing AI red team and guardrail category. We are excited to partner with our teams to leverage critical industry inflection moments to demand increasingly robust and sophisticated safety solutions.”
– Guru Chahal and James Alcorn, partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners
