Redactive AI secures $11.5 million in seed funding round

Redactive AI has announced securing AUD $11.5 million in a seed funding round co-led by venture capital firms Felicis and Blackbird.

The funding round also saw participation from Atlassian Ventures and automation technology company Zapier.

Redactive AI, founded in September 2023, aims to address gaps in AI engineering and security within enterprise software teams. The company's co-founders, Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, are both former product managers at Atlassian, while Lucas Sargent takes on the role of Chief Technology Officer. Sargent previously focused on AI and machine learning for regulated enterprises.

Speaking about the motivation behind starting Redactive AI, Pankevicius explained, "The open-source community was filled with incredible projects that showed what this next generation of AI could do. We saw first-hand how enterprises with fragmented data repositories and complex security controls would struggle to adopt bespoke generative AI agents and applications without their very specific, dynamic security needs being fulfilled to get these use cases into production."

Redactive AI's principal offering is a developer platform that facilitates the building of secure and enterprise-grade AI applications. The platform aims to simplify the information security, privacy, and permissioned access control needs of enterprises. Pankevicius said, "We considered the information security, privacy and permissioned access control needs of an enterprise first, and reversed that out into a simple to adopt developer platform for software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features or products that can seamlessly get through information security reviews and truly make their way into production quickly."

The platform has already been adopted by two large Australian financial services institutions, where it assists in scaling generative AI use cases to over 500 employees each. The company is also running pilot programmes with enterprises in the United States, particularly in the manufacturing and banking sectors.

Victoria Treyger, a general partner at Felicis, emphasized the importance of security and permissions in AI solutions for enterprises. "When we met Andrew and Alex, we were immediately impressed with their vision to make AI real for enterprises with a critical focus on security and permissions. We see significant market pull from large enterprise customers, especially banks, insurance companies, and other companies in regulated industries, to build their AI strategy in a secure way," she said.

Zapier's co-founder, Mike Knoop, commented on Redactive AI's unique approach to data permissions, stating, "With Zapier AI bots, users told us it was critical to control real-time access to their data. This is hard at scale as third-party data sources all do permissions differently! Redactive has a super unique approach that avoids having to build expensive and slow permission syncs."

The seed funding will be utilized to expand Redactive AI's team across engineering, customer success, and marketing departments. The company, currently based in Melbourne with ten employees, plans to grow its workforce to 15 by the end of the year and also extend its operations to San Francisco.

Blackbird Ventures' General Partner Michael Tolo also expressed his admiration for Redactive AI’s fast-paced development. "We’ve been impressed with the speed Redactive has been able to move at to solve critical challenges for AI-native application developers and compliant enterprises. It’s a testament to the deep expertise and thoughtfulness the founding team has to tackle the hidden security and governance challenges software teams get stuck on to be able to truly deliver production-grade, secure Gen AI applications," he said.