Lakera raised $20M in Series A funding to continue securing generative AI applications

Lakera, a company working to address the unique security challenges associated with generative AI, recently announced it secured $20 million after closing a Series A funding round led by Atomico and backed by Citi Ventures, Dropbox, and the company's existing investors, including redalpine. As a Lakera customer, Dropbox has benefitted from Lakera's technology to secure its systems against the threats posed by attack methods specifically targeting generative AI applications.

As Lakera sees it, its main goal is to provide guardrails to prevent model manipulation in a context where it has become increasingly easy for anyone to hack a system, regardless of their technical expertise. Because of the adaptive nature of generative AI, an added challenge to Lakera's mission is that traditional approaches with rigid rules, like those used to secure well-structured network traffic, will not work. By leveraging the power of generative AI, Lakera can develop dynamic security solutions that can secure AI-based systems in real time. Moreover, security teams only need a single API call to deploy an ultra-low latency security layer compatible with any generative AI model, which will not interfere with the application interactivity or developers' codebase.

However, Lakera's true differentiator is Gandalf, an AI educational platform that doubles as the world's largest red team. Gandalf has an impressive 250 million unique users worldwide, including Microsoft, which uses the platform for security training. The data generated by Gandalf's tens of thousands of daily unique attacks is aggregated into a database consisting of over 50 million data points, which combined with the team's expertise in building AI systems with real-time performance requirements, contribute to keeping Lakera's security solution up-to-date.

With an estimated 80% of enterprises deploying generative AI applications by 2026, Lakera's mission has never been more urgent. Lakera plans to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market strategy. This includes growing the presence of its San Francisco and Zurich offices to meet rising demand.