Kindo raises $20.6M to bring security to enterprise AI

Kindo, an enterprise AI security platform, has raised $20.6 million in funding and it also acquired open-source security project WhiteRabbitNeo.

Ron Williams, CEO of Kindo, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the company was started to make it safe for enterprises to adopt and manage AI technologies, including generative AI.

Drive Capital led the round, with participation from existing Kindo investors RRE Ventures, Marlinspike Partners, Riot Ventures, Eniac Ventures, New Era Ventures, and Sunset Ventures.

Venice Beach, California-based Kindo previously announced a $7 million seed round led by Riot Ventures in September of 2023. So the new round brings the total funding raised by the company to $27.6 million. Kindo was founded in October of 2022 by Ron Williams, former CTO of Subspace. Kindo has 23 people.

“The easiest way to think about this is we’re an orchestration platform that lets enterprises of all sizes really enterprises their best to integrate any AI capabilities or any AI model that’s in the market,” Williams said in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s in an API. You can integrate it including your own models. In IT and security, you can control who accesses those models, applications or other data sources, and what agents can talk to which models. It gives centralized control.”

In the past, companies had to wait for software-as-a-service companies to aggregate the cloud apps and centralize control, as IT and security leaders didn’t want to log into 100 different apps. When an employee leaves, they press a button and the privileges are removed.

“We’re doing the same thing with AI capabilities,” Williams said. “We think security needs to be very concerned about what is allowed when it comes to AI. We built those controls” so it isn’t so fragmented when it comes to controls.

Williams also said that his company is more like Switzerland, rather than a big platform company that wants to own all of the apps. In this respect, Williams believes he is ahead of the competition, as his company has been working on this for two years.

This new capital will be used to accelerate product development and enhance Kindo’s AI security and management capabilities through advanced R&D to stay ahead of evolving AI risks. The company will also expand sales and marketing efforts to reach more enterprises and grow the team with top-tier talent in AI security and enterprise software.

Chris Olsen, managing partner from Drive Capital, said in a statement, “Kindo’s innovative approach to AI security addresses a critical need in the enterprise market. As AI adoption accelerates, CIOs and CSOs need a trusted partner to navigate the complex landscape of AI security and governance. We believe Kindo is poised to become that essential partner.”

“As we continue our mission to be the most trusted AI platform for business, we are excited to partner with Drive Capital, who brings not only extensive capital resources but a wealth of experience supporting startups selling into enterprises,” said Williams. “Along with all of our existing investors, we have a deep bench of skilled company builders supporting our world-leading team of security and large-scale infrastructure experts from leading companies like Google, Riot Games, Hashicorp, Robust Intelligence, and many more.”

WhiteRabbitNeo security

In conjunction with this investment, Kindo has completed a transaction to acquire the open source cybersecurity AI model which was released under the project name WhiteRabbitNeo.

The goal of that deal is to develop next-generation security models for AI deployment, combining the WhiteRabbitNeo’s AI-powered security with Kindo’s deep understanding of enterprise AI infrastructure and governance, Williams said.

Kindo will be making ongoing investments in the open source community around WhiteRabbitNeo while packaging the powerful cybersecurity focused AI into the Kindo platform sold to enterprises. AI expert and WhiteRabbitNeo’s creator Migel Tiserra, who also publishes other high quality open source models under the Tess brand, will be joining Kindo as an advisor.

“I’m excited to find a new home for WhiteRabbitNeo at Kindo,” said Tiserra, in a statement. “The Kindo team is serious about solving the security challenges enterprises face and WhiteRabbitNeo adds a powerful tool to their platform. Now developers and security team members can for the first time leverage state of the art open source cybersecurity models to red team their infrastructure and uncover security vulnerabilities in code.”

“When we reached out to Migel about partnering with WhiteRabbitNeo to detect and solve enterprise security issues we quickly decided that a lot more could be done for the community and Kindo’s customers if WhiteRabbitNeo was brought fully into our product” said Williams. “Migel is a leading expert in fine tuning AI models with his generous open source model releases being downloaded hundreds of thousands times from HuggingFace which is a testament to the value Migel’s work has brought to the nascent generative AI community.”

“We’re supporting the open source project and expanding the community for it,” he said. “It’s really good at finding security vulnerabilities in your code.”

The model has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and there are more than a thousand security enthusiasts in the project’s Discord.

The Kindo team has top security and infrastructure experts from tech giants and unicorn startups. And it has made significant strides in addressing the unique challenges faced by enterprises adopting AI technologies, Williams said.

Challenges for AI in the enterprise

Kindo said the challenges for enterprise AI includes securing a large and growing list of AI models against data leakage and adversarial attacks. Security-minded firms must also ensure compliance with evolving AI regulations, managing the proliferation of shadow AI tools used by employees, provide seamless integration with existing enterprise systems, and deploy transformational AI tooling to every employee in the company like software developer coding assistants and chatbots.

Kindo solves these pain points by offering CIOs a centralized platform to easily and securely deploy and fully control the use of any AI capability across their organization. The platform supports various AI models (commercial, open-source, private) and use cases such as coding assistants, chatbots, and no-code AI agents.

Key features of Kindo

Key features of Kindo’s platform include centralized AI governance and security controls, data loss prevention for AI interactions, fine-grained access controls and audit logging, integration with 200-plus enterprise SaaS applications and support for on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployments.

Kindo’s customer base includes publicly traded companies along with leading consumer mobile application and open-source software organizations.

For CIOs of mid-size enterprises grappling with the challenges of secure AI adoption, Kindo offers a solution that enables innovation while mitigating risks.

Founded in September 2022 by Williams and tech industry veterans, Kindo brings together the expertise of former chief security officers and IT executives from tech unicorns Bird Rides, Clover Health, and Riot Games, as well as talents from Google, OpenAI, and Square. The company’s mission is to deliver enterprise-ready generative AI security, compliance, and centralized management, enabling businesses to leverage the full potential of AI safely and responsibly. Williams said he got the idea from experience in past IT transitions.

“It kind of rung a bell in my head that we’re getting ready to have a big AI transformation,” he said. “The same thing that like when the iPhone and Android came along. We saw this huge bubble in the transformation of desktop, laptops, instructional management, tools and devices.”

Williams said his company has multiple customers already, including Red Rock Entertainment, a casino company. Kindo targets companies that are using more than one model.

“They asked themselves, ‘What is the best way to control this stuff?’” Williams said. “We show up with a lot of credibility when it comes to our leaders. We make things easier. We do everything turnkey, so you don’t need AI experts in your company. The tool also ships with standardized interfaces for chat after building agents for a billing assistance. It makes it really easy to do support.”