Protect AI: End-of-Year Memo

As we close out 2024, I want to take a moment to reflect on the incredible progress Protect AI has made this year. Our journey continues to accelerate, driven by our mission to build a safer AI-powered world. The milestones we achieved reflect not only the strength of our vision, but also the relentless efforts of our exceptional team. Here are some of the highlights that defined our year:

Team Growth and Global Expansion: We achieved a remarkable ~300% year-over-year headcount growth. This expansion reflects our commitment to attracting and retaining top-tier talent in AI and security. To support this growth, we opened new offices in Berlin, Germany, and Bangalore, India, complementing our Seattle headquarters. Our expanding global presence ensures that Protect AI remains at the forefront of protecting artificial intelligence and machine learning systems across the world. People make a business, and our team is truly fantastic! (Join our team!)

Series B Funding and Market Leadership: In a testament to our market leadership, we successfully raised $60M in Series B funding led by Evolution Equity Partners , just a year after our Series A. This round solidifies Protect AI as the most funded startup in the AI security market. We are proud to have the continued support of Acrew Capital , boldstart ventures , 01 Advisors , Salesforce Ventures , Knollwood Investment Advisory , The Stepstone Group , Pelion Venture Partners , and Samsung Ventures . With this capital, we are well-positioned to further drive growth and define the AI security market segment.

Strategic Acquisitions: Our vision to provide comprehensive AI security led us to make strategic acquisitions, expanding our capabilities and accelerating our time to market. In 2024, we acquired Laiyer AI (LLM runtime security) and SydeLabs (AI red teaming). These acquisitions enriched our IP and brought incredible talent to our team. Both companies' solutions have been integrated into our product suite and rebranded as Layer and Recon.

Product Expansion: Protect AI now offers a comprehensive suite of four industry-leading AI/ML security products that secure AI end-to-end:

• Zero Trust for Models (Guardian): Scanning of ML artifacts and secure model gateway.
• AI Runtime Security (Layer): Detection and response across enterprise LLM applications.
• Automated GenAI Red Teaming (Recon): Red teaming as a product for LLM and GenAI use cases (SAST & DAST).
• AI-SPM (Radar): AI BOM and policy engine.

Our product suite lives on a platform that is truly enterprise ready and is built to meet the rigorous demands of enterprise customers, ensuring seamless scalability, integration, security, and resilience.

Customer Success and Market Positioning: Protect AI continues to win competitive RFPs and POCs against major incumbents and other start-ups. Our deep expertise in AI security has resulted in customer partnerships with some of the largest financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and technology companies, along with key government agencies. Our growing customer base (of massive enterprises) validates the strength of our solutions and our leadership in the market. The market and need for AI security is now!

Community Engagement and Market Education:

• Protecting Open Source: Our 16K+ person Huntr.com community has been instrumental in safeguarding AI. In 2024, over 3,000 new researchers joined, contributing 2,400+ AI/ML bug reports, and fixing 700+ vulnerabilities in critical OSS tools like Hugging Face Transformers, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, and MLflow. Huntr also became the partner of choice in reporting vulnerabilities for LangChain .
• Education and Knowledge Sharing: The MLSecOps.com community continued to thrive, producing 18 podcasts with industry leaders, hosting 10 events, and expanding our educational initiatives with a new AI Security training course with certification (free!).
• Innovating with the Community: Protect AI continues to contribute to the open source community across six OSS AI Security projects. New releases included a collection of AI/ML exploits and the first ever autonomous AI-discovered zero day tool. Across Protect AI OSS, we have seen millions of downloads, 1000s of stars, and many large enterprises using these solutions as a starting point to secure AI/ML.

Strategic Alliances and Partnerships: Our technology alliances ensure that AI security is embedded where our customers build and deploy AI. This year, we partnered with Hugging Face, Elastic, and Databricks. Protect AI's Guardian now serves as the security scanner for Hugging Face’s hub, ensuring the safety of over 1 million foundational models. We also launched our channel partner program with industry leaders like WWT ( World Wide Technology ), Microsoft, and Forcespot ( Forcespot DMCC ), further expanding our reach.

Industry Leadership and Recognition: Protect AI’s leadership in AI security has been acknowledged through numerous awards including:

• SINET 16 Innovator
• Fortune / Lightspeed Cyber 60
• CB Insights Top AI Companies
• Global InfoSec
• Enterprise Security Tech Cyber Top Companies
• Goldman Sachs' Builders and Innovators
• Inc Best in Business and Best Place to Work
• and many others :)

These accolades recognize not just our technology but also our people and culture, which remain the cornerstone of our success.

As we close this year, I am filled with immense pride and gratitude for everything we have accomplished together. The progress we made in 2024 has set a strong foundation for the future, and I am confident that with our team's dedication and innovation, we will continue to lead and shape the AI security landscape.

As we look to 2025, we remain steadfast in our mission to help our customers and partners build a safer AI-powered world. Thank you to our team, partners, and customers for your unwavering support and belief in Protect AI. Here's to continued growth and innovation in the year ahead!

Cheers!!!

Ian Swanson

CEO, Protect AI