Protect AI announced a $35 million Series A on July 26, 2023, to expand its AI and machine-learning security platform, research and open-source projects. Evolution Equity Partners led the round; Salesforce Ventures and existing investors also participated. Contemporary coverage put the company’s total funding at $48.5 million.
Who invested in Protect AI’s $35 million round?
Evolution Equity Partners led the Series A. Salesforce Ventures joined Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital and Pelion Ventures as participants. Reports published at the time said the financing brought Protect AI’s total raised to $48.5 million.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Ian Swanson, said the funds would support stronger platform capabilities, expanded research and new open-source projects. VentureBeat also reported plans to invest in go-to-market work, sales and marketing, and customer success. These were the company’s intentions when it announced the financing; the available reporting does not establish how the money was ultimately spent.
What did Protect AI’s software do?
In 2023, Protect AI described its platform as security software for organizations building and operating AI and machine-learning systems. Its intended users included AI developers, ML engineers and application-security professionals. The product descriptions below reflect contemporary reporting, not a guarantee of current product availability, features or cloud compatibility.
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AI Radar: inventory and supply-chain security
AI Radar was presented as a way to discover and inventory components used across AI/ML systems, identify supply-chain risks and monitor systems for security issues. SecurityWeek described three main elements: real-time visibility, a dynamic machine-learning bill of materials (MLBOM), and security for pipelines and models.
An MLBOM is an inventory of the components and dependencies that make up a machine-learning system. In AI Radar’s 2023 description, that inventory could include models, code and data used for training or testing. Such a record can help security teams understand what is present in a system and investigate whether a vulnerable or untrusted component is part of it.
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SecurityWeek said AI Radar could scan large language models and other ML inference workloads for policy violations, model vulnerabilities and malicious code injection. It also reported integrations with third-party application-security and CI/CD orchestration tools. VentureBeat characterized the platform more broadly as an asset inventory and security-monitoring system.
NB Defense: Jupyter Notebook security
GeekWire described NB Defense as Protect AI’s initial open-source product, aimed at security issues in Jupyter Notebooks. Its coverage also said the company’s tools worked across Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Those are descriptions from 2023, not confirmation of present-day compatibility.
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- EIGHT CHANNEL LPDDR5X - LPDDR5X is a new ground breaking memory small form factor installed on-board. With blazing speeds up to to 8000MT/s, it runs 1.5x faster than the DDR5 SODIMMs; 90% better performance over DDR5 SODIMMs in video conferencing and photo editing; 30% better performance in productivity apps; 12% better performance in digital content workloads.
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Why was AI/ML security a concern?
AI systems depend on more than a trained model. They can also rely on datasets, code, libraries, development notebooks, deployment pipelines and inference services. A compromised or vulnerable part of that chain can create risk even when the model itself appears to work as intended. Inventory and scanning tools are designed to help teams find components and potential weaknesses before or during deployment; they do not, by themselves, establish that a system is secure.
The funding coverage framed this as an emerging security challenge. Evolution Equity Partners founder and managing partner Richard Seewald said in July 2023 that major cybersecurity vendors did not yet offer a solution to the problem. That was his assessment at the time, rather than an independently established comparison of the market.
GeekWire reported that a 2023 KPMG survey found 6% of organizations had a dedicated team for evaluating risk and implementing mitigation as part of their generative-AI strategy. This is a dated statistic as reported by GeekWire, not a current measure of organizational readiness.
What happened to Protect AI after the funding announcement?
A May 2025 report by CIO&Leader said Palo Alto Networks had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Protect AI and expected the company to join Prisma AIRS. The report described the deal as subject to customary regulatory approvals and anticipated completion in Palo Alto Networks’ first fiscal quarter of 2026. The available information here does not establish whether the acquisition closed, so Protect AI’s current ownership and product status should not be assumed.
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Quick Recap
Sources
- SecurityWeek’s July 27, 2023 report on the financing, AI Radar and the investor commentary.
- GeekWire’s July 26, 2023 report on the round, NB Defense and the KPMG statistic.
- TechCrunch’s July 26, 2023 coverage of the financing, product context and Ian Swanson’s comments.
- VentureBeat’s coverage of the platform and planned business investments.
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