Today, our team is thrilled to celebrate an incredible milestone: Palo Alto Networks has announced its intent to acquire Salesforce Ventures portfolio company Protect AI. This acquisition represents a powerful validation of Protect AI’s pioneering vision in AI security and marks an exciting new chapter in their journey to make AI safer for enterprises worldwide.
A Visionary Team Ahead of Their Time
When we invested in Protect AI in July 2023, we saw something special: a founding team with the rare combination of deep AI/ML expertise and cybersecurity acumen, who recognized a critical gap in the market long before others. Led by serial entrepreneur Ian Swanson, along with co-founders Daryan Dehghanpisheh and Badar Ahmed, Protect AI set out to define and build the MLSecOps category from the ground up.
What’s remarkable is that Protect AI began building their vision in late 2021 — over a year before ChatGPT was released and long before “AI security” became the business imperative it is today. They foresaw that as AI adoption accelerated, traditional security approaches would be insufficient to protect the unique workflows, data pipelines, and attack surfaces of machine learning systems, and that securing AI required rethinking security from the ground up.
From Category Creation to Industry Standard
In less than three years, Protect AI has evolved from a bold concept to an industry leader. The team’s journey exemplifies the power of visionary thinking coupled with relentless execution:
- The team started with a developer-first approach, launching open-source tools like NB Defense to secure Jupyter notebooks.
- They rapidly expanded their product portfolio to address the full AI security lifecycle with enterprise solutions including Guardian, Recon, and Layer and the open-source offerings LLMGuard and ModelScan
- Rather than starting with a single point product, they bucked conventional wisdom by building a comprehensive platform early, creating multiple entry points for enterprises seeking to secure their AI systems end-to-end
The Protect AI team didn’t just build the industry’s most comprehensive product portfolio, but also a growing MLSecOps community to advance best practices in this nascent but critical field.
The Perfect Strategic Fit
This acquisition comes at a pivotal moment when AI security has shifted from a future concern to an immediate priority. As enterprises race to deploy AI, they need comprehensive security solutions that address the unique risks of this new technology – from model manipulation and data poisoning to prompt injection attacks and more. We believe this theme will only grow more important as AI adoption accelerates.
Joining forces with Palo Alto Networks represents the perfect next step in Protect AI’s mission. As part of Palo Alto Networks’ newly announced Prisma AIRS platform, Protect AI’s technology will help secure AI at unprecedented scale – protecting the entire AI development lifecycle from model scanning and risk assessment to runtime security and posture management.
The Future of AI Security
With Protect AI joining Palo Alto Networks, enterprises will have access to the comprehensive protection they need to deploy AI securely across their organizations. We believe this is just the beginning of a wave of consolidation in AI security, as enterprises recognize the strategic importance of securing their AI investments. Protect AI has set the standard for what effective AI security looks like, and their impact will continue to grow as part of Palo Alto Networks.
We’d like to extend our sincere congratulations to Ian, Daryan, Badar, and the entire Protect AI team on this tremendous achievement. We also want to recognize our co-investors who shared in this vision: boldstart ventures, Acrew Capital, Evolution Equity Partners, Pelion Venture Partners, Knollwood, StepStone Group, 01 Advisors, In-Q-Tel, and others who believed in and supported this team from the earliest days.
Here’s to a future of more secure AI innovation!
