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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteVirtue AI raised $30 million in seed and Series A funding in April 2025 to develop and expand security products for AI models, applications, and agents. The company later built tools for testing AI systems and controlling agent actions; on August 17, 2026, Fortinet announced it had acquired Virtue AI and planned to integrate its capabilities into Fortinet’s AI-Native Security Fabric.
What the $30 million was for
SecurityWeek reported on April 15, 2025, that San Francisco-based Virtue AI had raised $30 million across seed and Series A financing. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures. The company said it would use the funding for research and development, market expansion, and hiring in AI safety and security.
The investment addressed a practical challenge for organizations adopting AI: the security risks are not limited to whether a model produces an incorrect answer. AI systems can expose data, be manipulated through their inputs, or take unsafe actions when connected to tools. Axios described Virtue AI’s pitch as bringing several kinds of AI security controls together rather than requiring security teams to manage separate tools.
Which AI deployment risks Virtue AI targeted
Virtue AI’s products were aimed at risks that can appear at different points in an AI system’s lifecycle. SecurityWeek and Axios described concerns including:
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- Compact and Efficient Design: The FortiGate 40F is designed for small to mid-sized businesses and enterprise branch offices, featuring a compact, fanless desktop form factor that ensures quiet operation and minimizes space usage.
- Robust Connectivity Options: Equipped with 5 GE RJ45 ports, including 1 WAN port and 4 internal ports, this model provides essential connectivity and flexibility for various network configurations in a small-scale environment.
- High-Performance Security: Offers up to 1 Gbps IPS throughput and 600 Mbps threat protection throughput, using Fortinet’s purpose-built security processor technology to deliver industry-leading performance and protection for SSL encrypted traffic.
- Advanced Threat Protection: Integrated with Fortinet’s AI-powered FortiGuard Labs, the FortiGate 40F offers comprehensive cybersecurity, identifying and mitigating both known and unknown threats to maintain robust security across your network.
- Simplified Management and Deployment: Features a user-friendly management console that provides comprehensive network automation and visibility, coupled with Zero Touch Integration with Fortinet’s Security Fabric for easy deployment.
- Data poisoning: compromised or manipulated data can undermine a model or the system built around it.
- Hallucinations: a model may produce unsupported or false output, which can be consequential in a business workflow.
- Prompt injection and jailbreaks: crafted inputs can try to make a model disregard instructions, reveal protected information, or perform disallowed tasks.
- Privacy leaks: prompts, outputs, or connected tools may expose sensitive information.
- Compliance failures: outputs or actions may violate an organization’s rules or applicable regulatory requirements.
These are different failure modes, so one safeguard cannot address them all. Testing seeks to uncover weaknesses before or during deployment; guardrails aim to block prohibited outputs or actions while a system is in use; and logging and access controls help organizations monitor and govern how agents operate.
How Virtue AI’s product lineup addressed those risks
SecurityWeek described Virtue AI’s original offerings as a combination of red-teaming, multimodal guardrails, and agent protection. The product descriptions below reflect company and media reporting, not independent product testing.
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- INTEGRATED FIREWALL APPLIANCE AND SECURITY SERVICES: Comes with FortiGate-40F Firewall Appliance, 3 years of FortiCare Premium, and FortiGuard Unified Threat Protection.
- UTP SECURITY FEATURES: Offers protection from advanced threats with DNS filtering, URL filtering, video filtering, and controls against botnets.
- IDEAL FOR SMALLER SETTINGS: Best suited for small to mid-sized businesses needing reliable security without the complexity of larger systems.
- CONTINUOUS SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE: FortiCare Premium ensures that technical help is readily available to manage and troubleshoot issues.
- COMPACT AND EFFECTIVE: Provides a powerful, yet compact security solution that effectively protects against a wide range of cyber threats.
| Product or capability | Role described in reporting | Scope or qualification |
|---|---|---|
| VirtueRed | Red-teaming to assess AI models, systems, and agents for weaknesses. | SecurityWeek reported more than 100 red-teaming algorithms spanning more than 320 safety categories aligned with regulatory requirements. |
| VirtueGuard-Text, VirtueGuard-Image, and VirtueGuard-Video | Guardrails intended to block outputs that violate policies or regulations. | The product names indicate text, image, and video coverage; the cited reporting does not provide independent performance results. |
| VirtueAgent | Protection for AI agents, including controls intended for autonomous systems. | Axios described agent guardrails as one of the company’s three broad product areas. |
The reported algorithm and category counts describe the breadth of VirtueRed’s testing approach; they are not a measure of how often it prevents attacks or guarantees regulatory compliance.
What AgentSuite added for autonomous agents
Virtue AI later presented AgentSuite as a unified security stack for agents. Unlike a model-only check, an agent-security approach also needs to consider what tools an agent can reach, what actions it takes, and whether those actions comply with policy.
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- Extensive Connectivity Options: The FortiGate 60F is designed with 10 GE RJ45 ports, including 2 WAN ports, 1 DMZ port, and 7 internal ports, offering broad flexibility and high-density connections for diverse enterprise networking needs.
- Superior Performance for Secure Networks: Features powerful system-on-a-chip acceleration to deliver top-tier security with 1.4 Gbps IPS throughput and 700 Mbps threat protection throughput, ensuring effective defense against advanced threats.
- Enhanced SSL Inspection and SD-WAN Capabilities: Utilizes purpose-built security processor technology to provide the industry's highest SSL inspection performance and robust SD-WAN functionality for secure, high-speed network operations.
- Simple and Effective Management: Comes equipped with a user-friendly management console that supports comprehensive network automation and visibility, alongside Zero Touch Integration with Fortinet's Security Fabric for streamlined deployment.
- Advanced Security Features: Leverages continuous threat intelligence from AI-powered FortiGuard Labs, identifying and mitigating both known and unknown threats, enhancing security across all network traffic, whether encrypted or not.
| AgentSuite component | Function described by Virtue AI |
|---|---|
| VirtueRed for Agents | Continuous red-team testing of agents. |
| MCPGuard | Validation for vulnerabilities in MCP servers and tools. |
| ActionGuard | Real-time enforcement of policies on agent actions. |
| Unified Agent Gateway | A centralized gateway for agent traffic and controls. |
| Observability | Visibility into conversations, actions, and tool calls. |
| Role-based access control and audit logging | Controls over who can access capabilities, plus centralized records of activity. |
In practical terms, this design addresses a different problem from blocking a harmful text response: an agent can create risk by calling an inappropriate tool, accessing information it should not use, or taking an action without sufficient authorization. Virtue AI’s product descriptions set out controls for those areas, but they do not establish independent effectiveness or a particular level of protection.
What happened to Virtue AI after the funding round
In a June 29, 2026, company announcement, Virtue AI named Sohaib Shaikh CEO and Daniel Le CFO/COO, following the departure of co-founders Bo Li and Sanmi Koyejo. The same announcement reported 600% year-over-year growth and listed AgentSuite, Agent ForgingGround, PolicyGuard, and Shadow AI among products launched in 2026. Those growth and product-launch details were company-reported; descriptions of the latter three products were not specified in the cited material.
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- INTEGRATED FIREWALL APPLIANCE AND SECURITY SERVICES: Comes with FortiGate-40F Firewall Appliance, 1 year of FortiCare Premium, and FortiGuard Unified Threat Protection.
- UTP SECURITY FEATURES: Offers protection from advanced threats with DNS filtering, URL filtering, video filtering, and controls against botnets.
- IDEAL FOR SMALLER SETTINGS: Best suited for small to mid-sized businesses needing reliable security without the complexity of larger systems.
- CONTINUOUS SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE: FortiCare Premium ensures that technical help is readily available to manage and troubleshoot issues.
- COMPACT AND EFFECTIVE: Provides a powerful, yet compact security solution that effectively protects against a wide range of cyber threats.
On August 17, 2026, Fortinet announced that it had acquired Virtue AI. Fortinet said it would integrate Virtue AI’s capabilities into its AI-Native Security Fabric, extending protection across AI models, applications, and agentic systems from development through runtime. Fortinet did not disclose financial terms and described them as immaterial to Fortinet.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What Fortinet says the acquired capabilities cover
Fortinet’s acquisition announcement described a broader security offering that builds on Virtue AI’s testing and runtime-control focus. These are Fortinet’s stated capabilities, not independently verified performance findings.
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- HARDWARE PLUS SECURITY SERVICES: FortiGate-60F Firewall Appliance bundled with 1 year of FortiCare Premium and FortiGuard Unified Threat Protection.
- UNIFIED THREAT PROTECTION (UTP): Secures against advanced online threats with comprehensive web filtering and anti-botnet technologies.
- OPTIMIZED FOR MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES: Tailored for businesses needing robust security without the infrastructure of larger enterprises.
- RELIABLE CUSTOMER SUPPORT: FortiCare Premium ensures high-quality support and service continuity.
- EFFECTIVE PROTECTION: Employs advanced filtering technologies to safeguard against sophisticated threats.
- Agent red-teaming across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains.
- Visibility and governance for agents and the tools they use.
- Continuous validation across model updates and policy fine-tuning.
- Automated red-teaming across hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories.
- Real-time guardrails for text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code.
Fortinet founder, chairman, and CEO Ken Xie said, “AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly.” The acquisition announcement also cited a Gartner forecast that products and tools for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents could grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030. That figure is a forecast attributed to Gartner by Fortinet, not a verified outcome.
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