Australian AI development startup Redactive raises $7.5 million to expand

Australian artificial intelligence engineering and security development startup Redactive Software Pty. Ltd. today announced it has raised $7.5 million in new funding to grow its employee base, ramp up its marketing efforts, and expand into the United States.

Founded in 2023 by former Atlassian product managers Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, and former self-employed machine learning engineer Lucas Sargent, Redactive is building a developer platform aimed at solving the problems surrounding AI engineering and security skillsets for enterprise software teams.

“Redactive started with a question,” Pankevicius says, “What if we first considered the information security, privacy, and authorized access control needs of an enterprise, and then turned that into an easy-to-deploy development platform that allowed software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features and products, seamlessly pass information security reviews, and actually move into production quickly?”

Redactive's platform is designed to simplify the information search required to personalize generative AI applications using proprietary or customer data. The company provides an application programming interface that handles data synchronization, document chunking, embedded models, vector store, and live permissioning of business data.

The platform provides what it calls a “virtual AI engineer,” eliminating the specialized data engineering knowledge that developers need to learn, implement, and maintain to build scalable, secure AI-enhanced applications for customer and productivity use cases.

Redactive claims to be the only developer platform that solves the AI ​​engineering and security skills shortage problem in enterprise software engineering teams by providing companies with the technology to circumvent stringent security requirements, connect to fragmented data sources, and ship bespoke generative AI applications reliably and securely into production.

Although Redactive is a relatively new company, it says it is seeing steady growth from large enterprises looking to harness the productivity-boosting benefits of generative AI while owning security, data flows and intellectual property. In Australia, Redactive's clients include two large financial services institutions.

Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures Pty. Ltd. led the seed round, with participation from Atlassian Ventures LLC and Zapier Inc.

“We see a huge market need from large enterprise customers, including banks, insurance companies and companies in regulated industries, to build AI strategies in a secure way,” said Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis. “We also valued the team's Atlassian DNA, commercial intuition and distribution relationships with Zapier and other partners early in Redactive's life stage.”

Image: Redactive