Aurascape, a provider of AI-native security, announced its launch after one year of stealth operations with $50 million in funding. The lead investors include Mayfield Fund and Menlo Ventures, along with a strategic set of investors such as Celesta Capital and security industry leaders, including former Palo Alto Networks CEO Mark McLaughlin, former Symantec CEO Greg Clark, the Chairman of Walden International Lip-Bu Tan, and former Zscaler Chief Strategy Officer Manoj Apte.
The company’s launch is notable due to its growth and the general availability of its AI Activity Control platform. And with incentives like time savings, creativity boosts, and productivity gains, AI adoption in the workplace continues to surge. But many leaders worry about full-scale AI adoption, citing concerns over data security, privacy, and brand-new AI-driven threats. Due to these concerns, over a quarter of organizations report attempting to block AI access.
The existing security solutions have yet to solve the need for comprehensive AI protection. Traditional firewalls, proxies, and Secure Service Edge (SSE) solutions cannot pivot fast enough to decipher the dynamic ways AI applications communicate, resulting in a lack of visibility in most AI activities. Most new AI security vendors depend on out-of-band deployment methods such as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or browser extensions, which miss key network details and cannot consistently enforce policies in real time. Plus, legacy threat prevention services have failed to stop modern attacks, and traditional DLP solutions are fundamentally broken, flooding teams with thousands of false positives while failing to address real customer challenges.
These shortcomings contribute to an increasing blind spot filled with uncertain AI-related threats and sensitive data exposure. Organizations need complete visibility into the growing list of AI tools and effective security controls to prevent AI-specific threats and keep critical data secure.
Aurascape enables businesses to innovate in the age of AI with a platform engineered for AI interactions. Driven by an AI-native engine, the platform provides unsurpassed breadth and depth of visibility and controls for every AI interaction.
The Aurascape platform builds upon an AI-native foundation to safeguard AI activity. With Aurascape, leaders can:
1.) Gain AI visibility and control – Monitor interactions with approved and unknown AI tools to Prevent AI-based threats and protect sensitive data.
2.) Reduce AI-related risk – Uncover shadow AI usage, block unsafe data sharing in prompts and responses, and nudge users towards safer behaviors.
3.) Protect users and data – Block only risky actions or entire applications with context-aware, dynamic policy that adapts based on data type, user permissions, and application risk profile.
4.) Allow safe copilot deployments – Improve user productivity while also addressing governance concerns in AI Copilot deployments. Monitor Copilot activity so these tools only access appropriate data when indexing corporate repositories.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is here to stay, and enterprises must implement strategies to monitor and protect AI use. Traditional security offerings were not designed for the ways AI applications operate, thus we see an unsolved need for comprehensive AI security today. This is why we tapped the brightest minds in the industry to re-imagine security for the AI era.”
- Moinul Khan, Co-Founder and CEO of Aurascape
“I’ve seen a lot of AI security startups launch in the last 12–24 months, and the AI-native, prevention-first approach Aurascape takes makes them stand out in a crowded space. The team’s pedigree of seasoned founders from major security brands is a clear advantage. I’m excited to see where they go next.”
- Richard Stiennon, research analyst at IT-Harvest
“As Microsoft partner of the year in 2024, WinWire is forward leaning on harnessing AI for productivity. Aurascape provides the visibility and controls we need to ensure safe AI usage. They are responsive to feedback and deliver new features quickly.”
- Vineet Arora, CTO of WinWire Technologies and an Aurascape customer
