Jerusalem:
Israeli cybersecurity startup Apex, which focuses on protecting the rapid use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, said Thursday it has received an undisclosed investment from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In total, Apex raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Index Ventures, Altman and others, the report said. Altman did not immediately comment.
Apex said it had conducted tests with a number of Fortune 500 companies and investment firms and was close to finalizing paid contracts. The new funds will go toward accelerating product development, hiring and marketing, the company said.
As demand grows for AI tools – including OpenAI's ChatGPT – that help complete tasks much faster, their users are looking for ways to protect their own data and prevent threats and inappropriate data from entering their systems.
“There is a whole new segment of threats and risks using AI models. It starts with data breaches and issues on the data side. It's about privacy, compliance and what comes back into an organization,” said Matan Derman, CEO of Apex, to Reuters. .
That marked a pivotal moment for the cybersecurity industry, which until now has focused on preventing and blocking unwanted access, he said.
“We started Apex to build the extra layers of security that businesses need (AI),” he said. “We will try to take this as far as possible.”
Israel is a global leader in cybersecurity with hundreds of startups.
Ten months ago, Derman founded Apex with Tomer Avni, whom he met when both were serving as officers in the Israeli army's elite intelligence unit 8200. Since then, the company has been operating in so-called stealth mode and secretly working with selected companies.
“Every board, every CEO, every investor and every entrepreneur is talking about AI and how to leverage AI,” Avni said. “So the need for safety is much more urgent.”
Avni said AI is the latest in major technological shifts, which started with the rise of personal computers and then moved to networking and the cloud, each requiring additional security.
“AI will probably be bigger than all these (previous) revolutions,” he said, “because AI is just everywhere.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)