Exclusive: Virtue AI scores $30M funding to keep AI secure
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Virtue AI has raised a $30 million seed and Series A funding round led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, the company exclusively shared with Axios.
Why it matters: If Virtue AI's platform works as intended, it could solve a major headache for security leaders who currently juggle multiple tools to address different AI-related vulnerabilities.
- Many existing AI security solutions are narrowly focused — covering only specific large language models or only offering a limited number of specialized features like guardrails or red-teaming.
Zoom in: Virtue AI provides a single platform with three distinct products for securing an organization's AI tools.
- The first is an algorithmic red-teaming platform that continuously tests AI tools for potential risks — such as hallucinations, privacy leaks, jailbreaks, and prompt injections — and sends results to the company's security teams.
- The second product is a set of guardrails that prevent general AI tools from producing outputs that violate internal policies or government regulations.
- The third offering is an agent guardrail solution that specifically protects the autonomous agents that are gaining popularity.
Between the lines: Virtue AI's co-founders — Bo Li, Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin, and Sanmi Koyejo — are academics who have studied AI for decades. They created Virtue AI after seeing preventable security breaches in real-world AI deployments.
- One example: The prominent case in which Air Canada's chatbot misinformed a customer about a bereavement travel discount policy that didn't actually exist. The company is now legally obligated to offer that discount.
- "This very broad risk surface, it raises a lot of concerns," Li told Axios.
The intrigue: Virtue AI already counts companies in finance, healthcare and IT among its customers, along with several frontier labs.
- Uber and Glean (a fellow Lightspeed Venture Partners portfolio company) are also both customers.
What's next: Li plans to expand the current 20-person team to around 50 this year, hiring for business development and machine-learning expertise.
- In a year, Li hopes Virtue AI will help protect "most AI product layers," including chatbots, codebases, agents, and models.
- "We can provide the security layer, and [our customers] can just focus on the products," Li said. "That's the vision."
