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.
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.
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.
To be clear, it's not about blocking access – it's about ensuring that AIs enhance productivity, without compromising security and safety.
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.