Our investment in Lakera: securing GenAI applications in real time
With the advent of Generative AI (GenAI), we’re entering a new phase of the Internet - an Internet of Agents, where autonomous digital entities can be trained to make millions of decisions on our behalf. Agents already allow businesses to talk to customers, generate video, build code - all without traditional programming. Even when acting as a co-pilot, GenAI apps serve endless use cases.
By 2026, 80% of enterprises are expected to use GenAI or GenAI-enabled applications in production environments, up from less than 5% in 2023. But most of these companies haven’t yet made the most of the benefits GenAI can bring, as they’re worried about the cybersecurity risks that come along with it - whether that’s data theft, the creation of harmful content, or a jailbreak. Cybersecurity is one of top-3 concerns in corporations' adoption of genAI, as the standard systems and products just aren’t able to keep up with all the different and constant-evolving vectors of attack, now that all companies’ internal systems are exposed to the outside world.
Lakera, Atomico’s newest partnership, is the world’s leading real-time GenAI security company. The company was founded in Zurich in 2021 by David Haber, Mateo Rojas-Carulla and Matthias Kraft, who previously developed autonomous flight systems requiring extremely high reliability - exactly what is needed for a security system to bring piece of mind. Lakera’s comprehensive approach to AI security delivers three key benefits for enterprises: protection that doesn’t slow down their AI applications; the ability to stay ahead of AI threats with continuously evolving intelligence and feedback loops; and centralised implementation of AI security controls.
Lakera has already become a thought leader in the AI security space, in part thanks to Gandalf - an AI security educational platform created by the company which serves as the world's largest AI red team - that has generated more than 50m prompts and is used by many enterprises, including Microsoft where it’s a part of staff security training. Gandalf generates a real-time database of AI threats which is growing by hundreds of thousands of new attacks every day and keeps Lakera’s protection ahead of attackers.
Lakera has already made significant progress since it was founded in 2021, and now counts companies like Dropbox and a top-three US bank amongst its customers, with hundreds of enterprises proactively reaching out to get protected. With this $20M Series A round, Lakera will continue to build out-of-the-box AI protection that works in real time so that more businesses can integrate GenAI into their products without compromising their security. As part of this investment, Atomico partner Sasha Vidoborskiy will join Lakera’s board.
