Sam Altman-backed Apex emerges from stealth with $7M to help secure AI adoption
Sam Altman-backed Apex emerges from stealth with $7M to help secure AI adoption
The Israeli company has built a security platform that provides organizations with comprehensive visibility of their AI activity
Israeli AI security company Apex has announced it has emerged from stealth with $7 million in Seed. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, with participation from angel investors, most notably OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, there has been a huge rise in Generative AI capabilities across all industries globally. However, the rapid uptake of AI technologies brings a range of security challenges for businesses, such as data leaks or AI-driven cyberattacks.
Apex has built a security platform that provides organizations with comprehensive visibility of their AI activity. This allows them to define how AI is used across the company and enforce security policies accordingly. Its platform can detect violations of the security standards of the company or industry, and detect and respond to AI attacks so that companies can leverage AI technologies to avoid data leaks, malicious data injection, privacy and legal violations, or cyberattacks.
"Apex was founded with the mission of empowering security and AI teams to enable the secure and swift AI adoption within world-class organizations," said Matan Derman, Co-Founder and CEO at Apex. "During the company's founding, we consulted with dozens of executives to understand their needs and discovered a reluctance to adopt advanced AI due to security concerns. Apex is positioned to change all that, playing a key role in helping organizations secure AI models and applications and enabling them to leverage the power of AI safely."
The company was founded in 2023 by Derman and Tomer Avni, who serves as CPO. The duo met during their Unit 8200 service where they served as Lieutenant Colonel and Captain, respectively. Both hold Master’s degrees from Stanford and Harvard and Apex already caters to various Fortune 500 companies as clients - 80% of which already have employees using ChatGPT for work.
“We are proud to partner with Matan and Tomer, and we are excited to see Apex Security quickly emerging as the leader in generative AI security,” said Bogomil Balkansky, Partner at Sequoia Capital. Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures, added: “As companies start using AI and large language models, they expose themselves to new risks, including data leaks, privacy, intellectual property breaches, or dedicated AI attacks. Apex is focused on resolving this particular dilemma.”
