TrojAI Inc. announced a new round of seed funding of CAD$3M co-led by Seattle’s Flying Fish Ventures and Atlantic Canada’s largest venture capital fund, Build Ventures. This follows a $750K pre-seed round one year ago with Techstars, Concrete Ventures, and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, all of which participated in the round.
Cybersecurity for AI Solutions Provider TrojAI Inc. Closes $3M Seed Round and Expands Protections to Include Natural Language Processing
As Government Regulations Push for Greater Focus on Responsible AI
TrojAI Inc. announced a new round of seed funding of CAD$3M co-led by Seattle’s Flying Fish Ventures and Atlantic Canada’s largest venture capital fund, Build Ventures. This follows a $750K pre-seed round one year ago with Techstars, Concrete Ventures, and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, all of which participated in the round.
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“As more companies speed to get AI solutions to market few are prepared for, or even aware of the very real security threats that can be introduced with malicious data injected into training sets,” says Frank Chang, Managing Partner at Flying Fish, “and TrojAI is the only company we’ve seen that has the team and technology to identify and remove it.”
This new round of funding will be used to expand tooling to protect the entire AI pipeline from training through to deployment including: (i) protecting training data from data poisoning which can occur at multiple stages through the data supply chain, (ii) model evasion attacks which bad actors can use to fool deployed models and (iii) tracking robustness of models to both naturally occurring and malicious long-tailed edge cases. Such attacks are attractive to malicious actors who wish to cause harm or achieve competitive advantage and financial gain.
Additionally, this round of funding will help scale the team as new Natural Language Processing protections are added to the TrojAI Platform which already includes support for building more robust computer vision, helping enterprises deploy more accurate and secure models up to 25% faster.
Over the past year, TrojAI Inc. has participated in the Techstars Montreal AI accelerator, the Rogers Cyber Catalyst program out of Ryerson University, the Global Affairs Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) for Cybersecurity and is currently working with Venture Lab and Creative Destruction Lab, both out of Toronto, Canada. TrojAI is supported by the National Research Council of Canada and is a Gartner Representative Vendor for Adversarial Resistance.
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This is CEO James Stewart’s second AI startup, the first being acquired by a publicly-traded Canadian defence company where he served as SVP Video Analytics. It was during this time that he increasingly became aware of the vulnerabilities of AI systems to adversarial attack. These attacks are sector agnostic impacting autonomous transport, robotics, fintech, medtech and defence applications.
“We’re at an inflection point similar to the World Wide Web in the early 90’s where innovation reorganized our world but sat atop infrastructure that was created without security in mind,” says Stewart. “Our DNA is to protect and advance the pace of innovation that we’ve come to enjoy.”
Given the focus on emerging regulations and strict penalties around responsible AI, TrojAI Inc. offers market-leading tools to protect enterprise AI systems.
TrojAI Inc. is a Canadian-based firm dedicated to building cybersecurity solutions to enhance and protect AI innovations from both naturally occurring and adversarial ‘data poisoning’ and ‘model evasion’ attacks which can adversely influence model behaviours.
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