Lakera secures USD 10 million in funding to revolutionize AI security

16.10.2023 09:35, Rita Longobardi

Lakera, a TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award winner, has officially launched its mission to bolster generative AI application security. The company is now actively serving a diverse clientele that includes Fortune 500 giants, prominent LLM providers, and innovative startups and scaleups.

After a decade of honing their skills in machine learning for aerospace and healthcare, Lakera's co-founders – David Haber, Matthias Kraft, and Mateo Rojas-Carulla – recognized the growing prominence of large language models (LLMs). They were quick to identify that existing enterprise security solutions weren't suited to the unique demands of AI. In response, they launched Lakera to address this gap.

In August 2023, Lakera released Lakera Guard, a solution meeting the urgent need for safeguarding Large Language Models (LLMs) in production. Thousands of developers globally have since adopted it, using a proprietary database that collects insights from sources like the Gandalf AI education game. This extensive database, with nearly 30 million attack data points, keeps growing daily. It offers a one-line integration to fortify AI applications against various threats, primarily focusing on Q&A use cases like prompt injections, PII detection, content moderation, and hallucination prevention. Plans include extending support to autonomous LLM agents and more use cases.

“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,” said David Haber, Founder and CEO of Lakera.

The Zurich-based startup raised USD 10 million in financing earlier this year led by Redalpine. Additional investors Fly Ventures, Inovia Capital, and angels including the co-founders of Snyk, the CISO at Palo Alto Networks, an SVP at Datadog, and the former CEO at Hybris Ariel Lüdi.

The ICT startup was ranked among the TOP 100 Swiss Startups in 2023.


Lakera Co-Founders Matthias Kraft, David Haber, and Mateo Rojas-Carulla