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Harmonic, an early stage startup working on software to mitigate against unregulated AI apps harvesting company data at scale, has attracted $17.5 million in new funding as venture capital investors double down on AI security companies.
The British company said the Series A raise was provided by Next47, a venture investment house with interests in Claroty and Sysdig. Seed-stage investor Ten Eleven Ventures also expanded its equity position.
Harmonic has raised a total of $26 million since launching last October with ambitious plans to develop a new approach to data protection using pre-trained, specialized language models.
The brainchild of former Digital Shadows chief executive Alastair Paterson, Harmonic is promising relief from the burden of managing complex data classification and labelling exercises and noisy rules.
Harmonic says it has trained its own language models for data protection that are based on unique datasets of highly realistic sensitive materials. The company claims its software can accurately detect all types of sensitive data in milliseconds.
Harmonic is among a crowded field of AI-focused cybersecurity startups looking to find profits as businesses embrace AI and LLM (large language model) technologies to automate security tasks.
A wave of new startups like CalypsoAI ($23 million raised) and HiddenLayer ($50 million) have raised major funding rounds to help businesses secure generative AI deployments.
Hotshot company OpenAI is already using security as its sales pitch for ChatGPT Enterprise while Microsoft and others are putting ChatGPT to work on solving threat intelligence and other security problems.
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