Virtue AI, a company founded by world-leading experts in AI safety and security, announced $30 million in seed and Series A funding by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures, and joined by Prosperity7 and other existing investors, including Factory, Osage University Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, Amarjit Gill, and Chris Re.
This funding will advance Virtue AI’s goal of eliminating the traditional tradeoff between AI innovation and security, enabling enterprises to deploy generative AI confidently without worrying about security, safety, and compliance.
Virtue AI was created from a critical insight shared by its founding team of AI pioneers: Bo Li, Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin, and Sanmi Koyejo. After contributing 80+ combined years to foundational research in AI safety and security, they witnessed firsthand how enterprises were forced to move quickly with increased risk or implement cumbersome safety measures that dramatically slowed innovation.
Traditional computing security has been insufficient for AI use cases. And as AI transforms industries, organizations face significant deployment risks from data poisoning and hallucinations to prompt injections and jailbreaking attempts. These vulnerabilities expose companies to cyberattacks while creating regulatory and compliance challenges.
Virtue AI’s comprehensive platform offers integrated solutions that outperform existing alternatives by orders of magnitude, including:
1.) VirtueRed – An algorithmic (rather than human-based) red teaming platform that covers over 320 regulation-based and use case-based risk categories, such as hallucination, privacy leakage, jailbreaks, and prompt injections, providing reliable, comprehensive risk assessment while significantly reducing testing costs.
2.) VirtueGuard – Guardrail models that are over 30 times faster than alternatives while delivering 40-50% better performance across text, image, audio, video, and code in over 90 languages.
3.) VirtueAgent – A security agent automatically interprets internal company security requirements, policies, and regulations, eliminating tedious manual processes.
The company’s technology also builds directly on groundbreaking research recognized by the National Security Agency (NSA), including a seminal paper by the co-founders that addresses multiple vulnerabilities in foundation models. And this technical superiority has driven remarkable customer adoption. Virtue AI has secured top-tier enterprise customers in just a few months since its launch.
With this new funding, Virtue AI will expand its platform capabilities, strengthen its market presence, and drive AI safety talent committed to enabling responsible AI deployment worldwide.
KEY QUOTES:
“We saw companies struggling with the same challenges repeatedly—subpar evaluation methods, inefficient guardrails, and manual processes that created bottlenecks in AI deployment pipelines. Our team has dedicated decades to solving these exact problems. Virtue AI transforms that expertise into practical solutions that eliminate the false choice between innovation and safety.”
– Bo Li, co-founder and CEO of Virtue AI
“Uber leverages Generative AI to deliver magical experiences for our end users. We’ve been collaborating closely with Virtue AI to implement robust content safety guardrails for our Gen AI applications, ensuring they are safe, responsible, and aligned with our community standards.”
– Kai Wang, the Group product manager on AI Platform, Uber
“At Glean, we’re committed to building AI that organizations can trust – secure, reliable, and enterprise-ready. Every company has unique security requirements, and we strongly believe in providing the flexibility to choose the approach that best aligns with those needs. Our collaboration with Virtue AI helps us stay ahead of emerging threats and deliver on our promise to keep users in control and their data protected.”
– Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean
“Virtue AI is shaping the future of GenAI security. Combining foundational research with advanced algorithms, Virtue AI is tackling the most critical vulnerabilities in AI systems head-on. Their disruptive technology and impressive market traction demonstrate the potential to redefine how organizations across the globe approach AI safety and security.”
– Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Managing Partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures
“Built on the fundamental AI safety research of its cofounders, Virtue AI has quickly established a leadership position atop the fast-growing AI red-teaming and guardrails category. We are thrilled to partner with the team to help them capitalize on a crucial industry inflection moment, as enterprises demand increasingly robust and sophisticated safety solutions for production LLM deployments.”
– Guru Chahal and James Alcorn, Partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners
