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From left: Protect AI CTO Badar Ahmed; President Daryan Dehghanpisheh; and CEO Ian Swanson. (Protect AI Photo)
Seattle cybersecurity startup Protect AI is on a roll.
The company on Thursday announced a fresh $60 million round.
Evolution Equity Partners led the Series B round; the New York firm also led the $35 million Series A round, raised a year ago.
Other investors in the latest round include 01 Advisors, StepStone Group, Samsung, Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
Protect AI also this year acquired Laiyer AI and SydeLabs.
The startup, founded in 2022 by former engineering leaders at Amazon and Oracle, helps companies monitor and secure their machine learning and AI systems. It offers five products and customers range from national security organizations to Fortune 500 companies.
The company is valued at $400 million, according to Bloomberg.
AI startups are gobbling a big chunk of funding in recent years, raising nearly a third of all dollars during the second quarter, according to CBInsights.
Cybersecurity startups also remain a hot target for investors. Funding to such startups rose 144% in Q2, according to Crunchbase. Last week, Seattle-area startup Chainguard raised $140 million at a $1.12 billion valuation.
“AI is being deployed across every industry at an accelerating pace, and organizations have realized they need security guardrails for these systems that are not being covered by incumbent security providers,” Protect AI CEO and co-founder Ian Swanson said in a statement.
This is Swanson’s third startup. His first company was Sometrics, a virtual currency platform and in-game payments provider. It was acquired by American Express in 2011. After that, he founded DataScience, a cloud workspace platform that was acquired by Oracle in 2018. Swanson also held AI leadership roles at AWS and Oracle.
Swanson is joined by Badar Ahmed, a former engineering leader at Oracle and DataScience, and Daryan Dehghanpisheh, a former leader at AWS.
Protect AI previously acquired Rebuff and Huntr.
The company employs 75 people across Seattle, Berlin, and Bangalore. It plans to hire another 50 people this year. Total funding to date is $108.5 million.
