Add AI application defense to your checkpoint Lakera purchases

The Silicon Valley-based platform security giant said the acquisition of San Francisco-based Lakera will address the dual challenge of protecting employee AI use and ensuring applications powered by AI. Companies aim to integrate Lakera's capabilities into Check Point's Genai Protect products with a wider security infrastructure, including WAF, network firewalls and email security.

“The scale and complexity of how these agents interact with each other is beyond what we've seen before,” Lakera founder and CEO David Haber told Information Security Media Group. “There's a big question here: 'How can we confirm that we trust these decisions?' And that's what Lakera ultimately tried to solve on a massive scale. ”

Founded in 2021, Lakera employs 60 people and recently completed a $20 million Series A round led by Atomico in July 2024. Checkpoint purchases startup Veriti to advance threat management).

What sets Lakera's approach to AI security stand out

Modern AI agents make autonomous decisions, manage processes, handle sensitive operations at scale, create whole new attack surfaces, Harbor said. The core issue is no longer data leakage or rapid injection, but whether we can trust AI-driven decisions with critical organizational capabilities. By participating in the checkpoint, Harbor said Recala will be able to expand its technology to a broader customer base.

“We spent about 15 years ago before Lakera and built an AI where safety and security absolutely must be important,” Haber said. “One of the core motivations behind launching Rakkala to begin with was to bring its security and security to organizations around the world. For us, this is essentially an incredible opportunity to bring that technology to hundreds of thousands of customers around the world.”

Roi Karo, Chief Strategy Officer of Checkpoint Software, said the acquisition is attractive due to the strength of Lakera's team of AI experts, its differentiated product approach, and the broader strategic value that can be added to the company's AI roadmap. Lakera's decision to build its own foundational model rather than relying on third-party models gave the company more powerful control over performance, accuracy, delays and costs.

“We found a very strong team of AI experts,” Karo told Information Security Media Group. “From a product itself perspective, Lakera appears to have chosen a more difficult but better way to solve the challenges many other teams are working on by building their own basic models.

When Check Point evaluated Lakera, the company was impressed not only with its technical refinement, but also with its product scalability, Karo said. With its vast amounts of rapid volume, real-time response requirements and ability to handle high-performance deployments, Lakera stood out from other M&A candidates. Lakera's team worked on safety-critical AI systems for sectors where failure is not an option.

“When we see Lakera as a company, our DNA is AI,” says Haber. “We've been based on AI for the past 15 years. We have a deep understanding of technology. One of the biggest challenges for security teams is to understand how technology works. We are partners in these organizations and help us understand how to navigate this fast, often confused, completely new world.”

How to checkpoint, lakera will come together

Karo said Lakera will first be integrated into Check Point's Genai Protect Platform. This focuses on ensuring AI use at the employee level by preventing leakage of sensitive data through the use of LLM. Beyond that, Karo said that integrating Lakera's capabilities across the Checkpoint product ecosystem, including network firewalls, WAFs and email security, will create a unified 360 degree AI security product.

“Everyone is struggling with the same question: 'How can we adopt AI in a very responsible and safe way?'” Karo said. “And now we have a better answer to this question.”

Check Point's Genai Protect prevents employees from leaking sensitive information or misusing AI tools, and Lakera's platform protects agents, models and applications interacting with your organization's data and infrastructure, Karo said. This architecture also allows for intelligent sharing of data between endpoints and apps to improve security decisions, increasing latency, accuracy and detection.

“When Genai Protect is installed on an end-user laptop, Lakera's products protect the application itself,” says Karo. “Together, we provide much better security for applications – 360 security about applications. That's how both can be combined.”

Others have made acquisitions in this area, but Karo said Checkpoint believes he is the only vendor with a production-ready full-stack platform that addresses both major use cases for AI security. Unlike others, they are not talking about the roadmap – they are the shipping products they work today. Joining Genai Protect and Lakera creates a security platform that spans employees, applications and infrastructure.

“We're playing for victory,” Karo said. “When we led the Internet revolution years ago, we lead the AI ​​revolution. We are in the market. Our products are ready. They are being tested on the ground.