Lakera founders David Haber, Matthias Kraft and Mateo Rojas-Carulla
At Redalpine, we're always on the lookout for the next GameChanger. Today, we're confident that we’ve found one such company: Lakera (RACVI), a pioneering Swiss AI security solution that enables developers to instantly secure generative AI applications in the enterprise.
We’re thrilled to lead Lakera’s $10M funding round, with participation from Fly Ventures, Inovia Capital, and several industry expert angels including the co-founders of Snyk and key executives from Palo Alto Networks, Datadog, and Hybris. With Lakera’s focus, the future of software development will see AI security considerations front and center, ensuring the safe and effective use of LLMs.
David Haber, founder and CEO of Lakera, said: “When you build AI for airplanes and healthcare, high security standards become baked into everything you do. For AI to reach its full potential, we need these same high standards applied in the enterprise. Developers have a huge role to play in the AI era. AI security has to be incorporated into the development lifecycle. Enterprise developers need an intelligent compute layer embedded in AI applications to ensure protection over time. That’s what Lakera delivers.”
Harald Nieder, General Partner at Redalpine, said: “AI presents security risks unlike anything we’ve seen before. Every organization looking to leverage AI will have to navigate this new threat landscape. Lakera has one of the most experienced teams in AI with a treasure trove of vulnerability data. Their developer-first approach provides the missing link for all enterprises to deploy AI models with confidence."
Alongside David Haber, Lakera was founded by Matthias Kraft and Mateo Rojas-Carulla. The founder team previously spent a decade developing machine learning systems for aerospace and healthcare. They saw the rapid rise of LLMs and founded Lakera to fill the gap in existing enterprise security solutions and make an impact in the fast-growing multiple billion security market.
Lakera recently released the beta version of its latest product, Lakera Guard, which is powered by a proprietary database that combines open source databases and its own research with crowdsourced insights from Gandalf, Lakera’s viral AI education game played by over half a million users. So far, Lakera’s database has amassed nearly 30 million attack data points and is growing by 100k+ entries every day. Lakera Guard allows developers to activate this vulnerability data with one line of code, instantly embedding a security layer into AI applications in production.
Currently, Lakera Guard is equipped to secure Q&A use cases by protecting against prompt injections (including jailbreaks, escape characters, role play, and system prompt leakage), detect PII and masking, moderate content, and secure hallucinations. As a next step, Lakera will add additional use cases, including support for autonomous LLM agents.
With AI weaving into the very fabric of most industries, it's evident that robust security is not just desirable – it's essential. We look forward to continuing to empower Lakera as they ensure the vast potential of AI is reached safely.
Find out more in this TechCrunch article and try out Lakera Guard for free here.