web analytics

Learn AI With Kesse | Newest Trends in Artificial Intelligence

We answer questions about artificial intelligence and bring you what's new in the AI World.

Lakera Secures $20 Million to Protect AI from Malicious Prompts

4 min read

Lakera, a Swiss startup, is making waves in the AI industry with its focus on safeguarding generative AI applications. The company has successfully raised $20 million in a Series A funding round. As generative AI continues to grow, so do concerns about data privacy and security vulnerabilities.

Founded in 2021, Lakera has quickly become a key player in the field of AI security. The company’s technology aims to protect organizations from threats such as data leakage and unauthorized access. This funding will help Lakera enhance its offerings and expand its reach, particularly in the U.S. market.

Protecting Generative AI Applications

Lakera, a Swiss startup, is focusing on safeguarding generative AI applications from malicious prompts and other online threats. The company recently secured $20 million in a Series A funding round led by European venture capital firm Atomico. Given the rise of generative AI, driven by popular apps, security concerns in enterprise settings have also surged, particularly around data privacy and security vulnerabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) power generative AI, allowing machines to understand and generate text similarly to humans. However, these models need prompts to deliver outputs, which can be manipulated to carry out unauthorized activities like revealing confidential information. This exploitation method, known as prompt injection, poses a significant threat that Lakera aims to mitigate.

Lakera’s Origins and Technology

Founded in 2021 in Zurich, Lakera officially launched last October, backed by $10 million in funding. Its primary goal is to protect organizations from LLM security weaknesses, including data leakage and prompt injections. The company’s technology is compatible with various LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-3, Google’s Bard, Meta’s LLaMA, and Anthropic’s Claude.

Lakera positions itself as a low-latency AI application firewall that secures data traffic in and out of generative AI applications. Its flagship product, Lakera Guard, is built on a database collating insights from diverse sources such as publicly available datasets on Hugging Face, in-house machine learning research, and an interactive game called Gandalf.

Interactive Learning and Taxonomy

Gandalf, an interactive game developed by Lakera, challenges users to trick it into revealing a secret password. The game gets increasingly sophisticated as the levels advance, helping Lakera create a prompt injection taxonomy that categorizes different types of attacks.

According to co-founder and CEO David Haber, “We are AI-first, building our own models to detect malicious attacks such as prompt injections in real time.” These models learn from vast amounts of generative AI interactions, continuously improving to adapt to new threats.

Lakera Guard Features and Applications

By integrating Lakera Guard’s API, companies can better protect against malicious prompts. Lakera has also developed specialized models to scan for harmful contents like hate speech, violent material, and profanities. These are crucial for public-facing applications like chatbots, and can be easily integrated with a single line of code.

Companies can access a centralized policy control dashboard to fine-tune content thresholds based on the type of material. This makes Lakera Guard flexible and adaptable, suitable for a range of applications and industries.

With $20 million in new funding, Lakera is prepared to expand globally, focusing primarily on the U.S. market. It already has a number of high-profile customers in North America, including AI startup Respell and Canadian unicorn Cohere.

“Large enterprises, SaaS companies, and AI model providers are all racing to roll out secure AI applications,” said Haber. The financial services sector, in particular, has been quick to adopt this technology due to its inherent security and compliance risks, but interest is growing across various industries.

Funding and Future Prospects

Aside from Atomico, Lakera’s Series A funding round saw participation from several prominent investors, including Citi Ventures and Redalpine. This financial backing underscores the growing importance of securing generative AI applications.

The new funding will enable Lakera to scale its operations and refine its technology further, aiming to offer even more robust protection against emerging AI threats.


In summary, Lakera’s focus on safeguarding generative AI applications from malicious prompts showcases its commitment to AI security. The startup’s recent $20 million funding round signals a growing recognition of the importance of AI safety. With innovative solutions like Lakera Guard, the company is well-positioned to tackle emerging AI threats and expand its reach globally.

As AI technology continues to evolve, protecting it from vulnerabilities becomes increasingly crucial. Lakera’s proactive approach and advanced technology set a high standard in the industry. The company’s expansion plans and continued innovation promise a safer future for generative AI applications.

About The Author

We use cookies to personalize content and ads and to primarily analyze our geo traffic sources. We also may share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising, and analytics partners to improve your user experience. We respect your privacy and will never abuse your information. [ Privacy Policy ] View more
Cookies settings
Accept
Decline
Privacy & Cookie Policy
Privacy & Cookies policy
Cookie name Active

The content on this page governs our Privacy Policy. It describes how your personal information is collected, used, and shared when you visit or make a purchase from learnaiwithkesse.com (the "Site").

Kesseswebsites and Advertising owns Learn AI With Kesse and the website learnaiwithkesse.wiki. For the purpose of this Terms and Agreements [ we, us, I, our ] represents the owner of Learning AI With Kesse which is Kesseswebsites and Advertising. [ You, your, student and buyer ] represents you as the user and visitor of this site. Terms of Conditions, Terms of Service, Terms and Agreement and Terms of use shall be considered the same here. This website or site refers to https://learnaiwithkesse.com. You agree that the content of this Terms and Agreement may include Privacy Policy and Refund Policy. Products refer to physical or digital products. This includes eBooks, PDFs, and text or video courses. If there is anything on this page you do not understand you agree to reach out to us via email [ emmanuel@learnaiwithkesse.com ] for explanation before using any part of this site.

1. Personal Information We Collect

When you visit this Site, we automatically collect certain information about your device, including information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device. The primary purpose of this activity is to provide you a better user experience the next time you visit our again and also the data collection is for analytics study. Additionally, as you browse the Site, we collect information about the individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Site, and information about how you interact with the Site. We refer to this automatically-collected information as "Device Information."

We collect Device Information using the following technologies:

"Cookies" are data files that are placed on your device or computer and often include an anonymous unique identifier. For more information about cookies, and how to disable cookies, visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org. To comply with European Union's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), we do display a disclaimer a consent text at the bottom of this website. This disclaimer alerts you the visitor or user of this website about why we use cookies, and we also give you the option to accept or decline. If you accept for us to use cookies on your site, the agreement between you and us will expire after 180 has passed.

"Log files" track actions occurring on the Site, and collect data including your IP address, browser type, Internet service provider, referring/exit pages, and date/time stamps.

"Web beacons," "tags," and "pixels" are electronic files used to record information about how you browse the Site.

Additionally, when you make a purchase or attempt to make a purchase through the Site, we collect certain information from you, including your name, billing address, shipping address, payment information (including credit card numbers), email address, and phone number. We refer to this information as "Order Information."

When we talk about "Personal Information" in this Privacy Policy, we are talking both about Device Information and Order Information.

Payment Information

Please note that we use 3rd party payment processing companies like https://stripe.com and https://paypal.com to process your payment information. PayPal and Stripe protects your data according to their terms and agreement and may store your data to help make your subsequent transactions on this website easier. We never and [ DO NOT ] store your card information or payment login information on our website or server. By making payment on our site, you agree to abide by the Terms and Agreement of the 3rd Party payment processing companies we use. You can visit their websites to read their Terms of Use and learn more about them.

2. How Do We Use Your Personal Information?

We use the Order Information that we collect generally to fulfill any orders placed through the Site (including processing your payment information, arranging for shipping, and providing you with invoices and/or order confirmations). Additionally, we use this [a] Order Information to:

[b] Communicate with you;

[c] Screen our orders for potential risk or fraud; and

When in line with the preferences you have shared with us, provide you with information or advertising relating to our products or services. We use the Device Information that we collect to help us screen for potential risk and fraud (in particular, your IP address), and more generally to improve and optimize our Site (for example, by generating analytics about how our customers browse and interact with the Site, and to assess the success of our marketing and advertising campaigns).

3. Sharing Your Personal Information

We share your Personal Information with third parties to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. For example, we use System.io to power our online store--you can read more about how Systeme.io uses your Personal Information here: https://systeme.io/privacy-policy/ . We may also use Google Analytics to help us understand how our customers use the Site--you can read more about how Google uses your Personal Information here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/. You can also opt-out of Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Finally, we may also share your Personal Information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other lawful request for information we receive, or to otherwise protect our rights.

4. Behavioral Advertising

As described above, we use your Personal Information to provide you with targeted advertisements or marketing communications we believe may be of interest to you. For more information about how targeted advertising works, you can visit the Network Advertising Initiative’s (“NAI”) educational page at http://www.networkadvertising.org/understanding-online-advertising/how-does-it-work.

You can opt-out of targeted advertising by:

COMMON LINKS INCLUDE:

FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=ads

GOOGLE - https://www.google.com/settings/ads/anonymous

BING - https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/policies/personalized-ads]

Additionally, you can opt-out of some of these services by visiting the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out portal at: http://optout.aboutads.info/.

5. Data Retention

Besides your card payment and payment login information, when you place an order through the Site, we will maintain your Order Information for our records unless and until you ask us to delete this information. Example of such information include your first name, last name, email and phone number.

6. Changes

We may update this privacy policy from time to time in order to reflect, for example, changes to our practices or for other operational, legal or regulatory reasons.

7. Contact Us

For more information about our privacy practices, if you have questions, or if you would like to make a complaint, please contact us by e-mail at emmanuel@learnaiwithkesse.com or by mail using the details provided below:

8. Your acceptance of these terms

By using this Site, you signify your acceptance of this policy. If you do not agree to this policy, please do not use our Site. Your continued use of the Site following the posting of changes to this policy will be deemed your acceptance of those changes.

Last Update | 18th August 2024

Save settings
Cookies settings