Portal26 wins $9 million for AI application governance platform

Portal26 Inc., a startup that helps companies protect employees from dangerous artificial intelligence applications, has raised $9 million in funding.

Shasta Ventures led the Series A investment. It involved the Fusion Fund and the venture capital arm of an unknown Fortune 500 financial services company. In today’s funding announcement, Portal26 said the proceeds will be used to support product development and growth efforts.

Portal26, based in Los Gatos, California, provides a cloud platform that allows companies to plan third-party AI services for use by their employees. The software maker says its platform highlights applications with poor cybersecurity controls. Portal26 has also found other issues, such as services that do not pose a cybersecurity risk but have regulatory compliance gaps.

The platform adds information about every new AI application it discovers to a central database. According to Portal26, this database helps speed up cybersecurity reviews. This also acts as a procurement tool. Managers can use it to see if employees have discovered new AI tools that should be adopted at the organizational level.

Portal26 says its platform not only identifies which AI applications are employed by employees, but also how employees interact with them. The platform analyzes various metrics related to prompts, attachments, and usage. You can stream that data to other cybersecurity tools.

When Portal26 detects potentially dangerous activity, it can instruct corporate firewalls to block affected AI applications. It then sends data about the incident to the company’s cybersecurity research tools.

Portal26 stores information about user interactions with AI applications in what it calls a forensic vault. Businesses can protect the contents of their vaults using their own encryption keys. This tool is compliant with NIST FIPS, a cybersecurity standard designed to ensure that federal technology systems are free of vulnerabilities.

The company says its forensic vault streamlines cybersecurity investigations by giving administrators access to trusted incident data. There are other use cases as well. For example, companies can use data collected by Portal26 to improve their cybersecurity training programs. If the platform indicates that marketing teams have started using Sora to generate promotional clips, administrators can add new training materials focused on video models.

The information collected by Portal26 is also useful to development teams. Data about how employees interact with third-party AI tools can be analyzed to inform the development of interfaces for your own AI applications.

“Portal26 outperforms our competitors in both customer quality and quantity,” said CEO Arti Raman. “The majority of these customers have large, multi-year contracts up to seven figures.”

The startup faces competition from larger market players, including CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., which acquired AI application governance startup Pangea Inc. in September. The deal was reportedly worth around $260 million. Pangea offers a browser extension that analyzes prompts that employees enter into AI applications and removes sensitive business data contained therein.

Image: Unsplash