Companies fear that their willingness to adopt AI has made them more vulnerable to cyber threats. According to a recent Opinion poll Of over 350 IT leaders, greater than half of the executives surveyed said the complexity of AI applications has weakened their organization's cybersecurity posture. According to a different survey, greater than two-fifths of executives consider their security teams lack the abilities needed to guard their AI applications and workloads.
The demand for solutions to secure AI apps has spawned a cohort of startups. For example, HiddenLayer and Protect AI give attention to defending AI systems from adversarial attacks, while Cranium provides application-level visibility into AI systems.
A brand new company emerging from obscurity today, Noma Securitydoes all this and more, claims co-founder and CEO Niv Braun. The startup develops tools to discover vulnerable data pipelines and code in data science environments, in addition to threats comparable to prompt injection attacks.
Braun founded Noma with Alon Tron after leaving customer experience automation company Verint, where he identified a “significant blind spot” for security teams in the info and AI lifecycle.
“Existing tools are designed for the normal software lifecycle,” Braun said. “However, the info and AI lifecycle is inherently different. It involves different R&D processes, relies on different technologies, and has unique technical vulnerabilities inside AI models.”
Noma is designed to assist detect and resolve misconfigurations within the components used to develop and run AI applications. For example, the platform looks for “sensitive” data in model training datasets, comparable to text that incorporates personally identifiable information.
Braun argues that corporations might be higher equipped to take care of threats in the event that they can consolidate AI app security capabilities right into a dashboard that might be deployed in cloud-based and self-hosted environments.
“Many single-function security solutions are flooding the market attempting to capitalize on the AI hype,” he said. “By helping corporations understand the footprint of their AI applications and giving them governance controls, Noma not only helps them minimize and mitigate risk, but in addition gives them the boldness they should manage their AI “Expand usage faster and to higher value parts of the business.”
Founded in 2023, Noma already has paying customers, including Fortune 500 customers in B2B software, financial services and retail, in keeping with Braun. The startup recently closed a $25 million Series A funding round, which Braun says was stymied by investors. Noma had money left over.
“We have decided to simply accept the ($25 million) although there are still significant funds within the bank to speed up our development and particularly our go-to-market teams and efforts,” he said, adding that Noma plans to expand its Double the scale of the 20-person team in the approaching yr.
Ballistic Ventures led Noma's Series A, bringing the corporate's total capital raised to $32 million. Noma raised $7 million in a previously undisclosed seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners and with participation from Cyber Club London.