Renowned AI security experts from Stanford, Berkeley, and Illinois unite to solve enterprise AI deployment challenges
Virtue AI, founded by world-leading experts in AI safety and security, today 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. The funding will accelerate Virtue AI's mission to eliminate the traditional tradeoff between AI innovation and security, enabling enterprises to confidently deploy generative AI without worrying about security, safety, and compliance.
Virtue AI was born from a critical insight shared by its founding team of AI pioneers—Bo Li, Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin, and Sanmi Koyejo. After contributing more than 80 combined years to foundational research in AI safety and security, they witnessed firsthand how enterprises were forced to choose between moving quickly with increased risk or implementing cumbersome safety measures that dramatically slowed innovation.
The multi-billion dollar AI security market opportunity is expected to expand as agentic deployments proliferate in the enterprise. However, traditional computing security is insufficient for artificial intelligence use cases. 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.
“We saw companies struggling with the same challenges repeatedly—subpar evaluation methods, inefficient guardrails, and manual processes that created bottlenecks in AI deployment pipelines,” said Bo Li, co-founder and CEO of Virtue AI. “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.”
Virtue AI's comprehensive platform offers integrated solutions that outperform existing alternatives by orders of magnitude, including:
- 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.
- 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.
- VirtueAgent: Security agent that automatically interprets both internal company security requirements, policies, and regulatory requirements, eliminating tedious manual processes.
The company's technology builds directly on groundbreaking research recognized by the National Security Agency (NSA), including a seminal, award-winning paper by co-founders that addresses multiple vulnerabilities in foundation models.
This technical superiority has driven remarkable customer adoption. In just months since its launch, Virtue AI has secured top-tier enterprise customers.
Customer Accolades
“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,” said 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,” said Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean.
Redefining Industry Standards
“Virtue AI is shaping the future of GenAI security,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Managing Partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures. “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.”
“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,” said Guru Chahal and James Alcorn, Partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “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.”
With this new funding, Virtue AI will expand its platform capabilities, strengthen its market presence, and continue attracting world-class AI safety talent committed to enabling responsible AI deployment worldwide.
For more information about Virtue AI and its safe and secure AI platform, visit virtueai.com.
About Virtue AI
Virtue AI is a leader in safe and secure AI, providing organizations with the tools to red team AI applications, train safe models, and deploy advanced guardrail solutions. Its Virtue AI Platform offers a comprehensive approach to assessing, developing, and maintaining safe, secure, and privacy-preserving AI systems, empowering businesses to harness the full potential of AI with confidence.
About Lightspeed
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the past 25 years, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally including Abridge, Affirm, Anthropic, Cato Networks, Epic Games, Glean, Mistral, Moveworks, Navan, Netskope, Rubrik, Snap, Wiz, and more. Lightspeed and its global team currently manage $30B in AUM across the Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in the U.S., Europe, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. www.lsvp.com
About Walden Catalyst Ventures
Walden Catalyst is a venture capital firm helping early-stage companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel build the next generation of category-defining businesses in deep-tech. The firm is led by Young Sohn and Lip-Bu Tan, deep-tech industry pioneers who between them have invested in more than 600 startups across the globe, of which 138 have gone on to IPO. Walden Catalyst is focused on deep- tech investments and their team of innovators and entrepreneurs are passionate about disruptive technologies and committed to excellence. This translates into unparalleled access to operational expertise, global reach, and a network of industry captains eager to help build and scale the companies of the future.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250415693312/en/
Virtue AI, founded by world-leading experts in AI security and safety, raised $30 million to offer the unified AI security and compliance platform for enterprise AI applications.
