Knostic is officially out of stealth as we’re named one of the three finalists in the RSAC Launch...
Ending LLM Oversharing: Knostic Raises $11MM to Secure Enterprise AI
Less than a year after our pre-seed round and winning both the RSA 2024 Launch Pad competition and the Black Hat 2024 Startup Spotlight competition – the only startup to win both competitions, Sounil and I are happy to share that we've raised an additional $11 million, bringing our total funding to $14.3 million. Our mission is to make AI secure and safe for enterprises in their AI transformation journey as they adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot, Glean, and other enterprise LLM capabilities.
The rapid adoption of LLM tools creates a major security problem, LLMs can’t keep a secret. Normal employees can now gain unauthorized access to sensitive information they should not be privy to, like salary information, sales revenue, M&A due diligence information, and more, simply by asking. It’s like giving an intern access to the CEO’s laptop on their first day.
What we learned from our first nine customers, is that their employees are inferring sensitive conclusions, even without direct access to the information. For example, they could uncover a secret project's scope from personnel assignments and equipment purchases. This inferred information, we call Knowledge.
“In this era of rapid digital transformation, it’s rare to find a board that isn’t asking about AI, yet attempts to keep LLMs in check have failed time and time again. Enterprises who want to use LLMs for their benefit need Knostic to lock down information – it’s that simple. We’re energized by the major demand Gadi and his team are already seeing, and we’re eager to support them as their customer base expands even further.”
"As an early investor in Knostic, we've witnessed the team build remarkable momentum in record time. While demand from U.S. enterprises has been very strong, what's particularly telling is the unprecedented interest we’ve seen from Japanese corporations as well, highlighting the true size of this opportunity. This global pull validates our thesis that every organization in the world adopting AI-powered productivity tools will need Knostic's technology."
So What Makes Knostic’s Approach Unique? It’s Simple: With Knostic, If You Need to Know, You Know. And If You Don’t, Then You Don’t.
Current AI security solutions are falling short. They focus on explicit permissions, labeling, and restricting training data, and they still do not prevent sensitive information from leaking. In fact, they can hinder the productivity of the LLMs and the value they bring.
“All or nothing access control requires tremendous configuration effort and still typically has holes or blocks people from getting work done. Knostic brings AI-powered common sense to enterprise systems using simple policy to define what knowledge is appropriate for what role and have that automatically enforced across the organization.”
This is where Knostic comes in - we provide need-to-know LLM access controls to lock down sensitive information - and where our customers already see value.
Knostic is the world’s first security startup focused on maximizing the power of need-to-know based access control. We can curate and shape answers, regardless of underlying permission system limitations, so no matter what any AI sends the user, it will fit within their need-to-know boundaries.
“We are excited to back the Knostic team because other vendors have tried so many different ways to lock down LLMs that have proved unimpactful, for new problems demand new solutions. Approaches like adhering to permission structures and labeling/limiting training data stifle innovation but don’t actually reduce harm and can increase workloads on already stretched teams. Knostic flips traditional approaches on their head by evolving the data space into an intelligent, segmented infrastructure that forces LLMs to stay in their lane. With Knostic we believe the market finally has a purpose-built solution that solves today’s issues and not yesterday's problems.”
To be clear, it's not about blocking access – it's about ensuring that AIs enhance productivity, without compromising security and safety.
"At SVCI, the CISO members devote considerable time and effort to evaluating specific segments of the cybersecurity market before deciding to partner and invest in a company. While the intersection of AI and security is broad, access control remains one of the most significant risks. As companies accelerate AI adoption at the board level, Knostic’s need-to-know technology plays a crucial role in facilitating this transformation. As a result, we, at SVCI chose to back Knostic”
We are thankful to Bright Pixel Capital, Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI), DNX Ventures, Seedcamp, and angel investors, among them Kevin Mahaffey (founder of Lookout), and Gerhard Eschelbeck (former CISO of Google), among others, who chose to join us for this round.
The bottom line is this: PCs had Norton. Networks had Palo Alto Networks and the cloud has Wiz. AI will need Knostic. We put an end to LLM oversharing.
About Knostic
Knostic was founded in 2023 by veteran cybersecurity experts and innovators Gadi Evron (serial entrepreneur, previously from Citibank and PwC) and Sounil Yu (former Chief Security Scientist at Bank of America), with the goal of ensuring the safe adoption of AI at enterprises at scale. Knostic is the world’s first provider of need-to-know based access controls for Large Language Models (LLMs). With knowledge-centric capabilities, Knostic enables organizations to accelerate the adoption of LLMs and drive AI-powered innovation without compromising value, security, or safety.
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