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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchProtect AI announced a $35 million Series A on July 26, 2023, to expand its software and research for securing machine-learning and AI systems. Evolution Equity Partners led the round, joined by Salesforce Ventures and existing investors. Contemporary coverage said the financing brought the company’s reported total funding to $48.5 million.
Who invested in Protect AI’s $35 million round?
Evolution Equity Partners led the Series A. Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital and Pelion Ventures also participated. The $48.5 million total was the amount reported after the round in 2023; it is not a current funding total.
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The financing was announced July 26, 2023. SecurityWeek, GeekWire and TechCrunch covered the round, with one report published the following day.
What did Protect AI say it would do with the money?
At the time of the announcement, co-founder and CEO Ian Swanson said the funds would support stronger platform capabilities, expanded research and new open-source projects. VentureBeat also reported plans to invest in go-to-market work, sales and marketing, and customer success. Those were stated intentions in 2023; the reporting does not establish how the funds were ultimately spent.
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What did Protect AI’s software do?
In 2023 coverage, Protect AI was described as enterprise software for helping organizations identify and address security risks in AI and machine-learning systems. The product descriptions below reflect reporting from that period, not a guarantee of current features, availability or compatibility.
AI Radar: inventory and security monitoring
AI Radar was presented as an inventory and monitoring platform for AI/ML assets. VentureBeat described its audience as AI developers, machine-learning engineers and application-security professionals; TechCrunch said the inventory could include training data, test datasets and code.
SecurityWeek described three pillars: real-time visibility, an automatically generated and dynamic machine-learning bill of materials (MLBOM), and pipeline and model security. In that account, AI Radar tracked components and dependencies, scanned large language models and other machine-learning inference workloads, and looked for policy violations, model vulnerabilities and malicious-code injection. SecurityWeek also said it integrated with third-party application-security and CI/CD orchestration tools.
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An MLBOM is an inventory of components and dependencies associated with a machine-learning system. The idea is to make the system’s makeup more visible so teams can investigate supply-chain exposure—for example, which components or assets may need attention when a vulnerability or policy issue is identified. The 2023 descriptions do not establish exactly what data the product currently inventories or how it is packaged today.
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NB Defense: notebook security
GeekWire described NB Defense as Protect AI’s initial open-source product, aimed at security issues in Jupyter Notebooks. The same 2023 report said the tools worked across Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. That historical report is not a current compatibility guarantee.
Why does AI/ML security matter to this funding story?
AI systems rely on more than a finished model: they can involve datasets, code, dependencies, development notebooks and deployed workloads. The products described in 2023 addressed parts of that wider system by attempting to inventory assets and scan models or pipelines for security and policy concerns.
GeekWire reported that a 2023 KPMG survey found 6% of organizations had a dedicated team for evaluating risk and implementing mitigation as part of their generative-AI strategy. That is a dated figure as reported by GeekWire, not a current measure of organizational readiness.
Swanson summarized the company’s aim as helping customers “build a safer AI-powered world,” according to TechCrunch’s July 26, 2023 coverage. Evolution Equity Partners founder and managing partner Richard Seewald argued in SecurityWeek the next day that large cybersecurity vendors did not then offer a solution to the AI/ML security challenge. That was Seewald’s assessment at the time, not an independently established description of today’s market.
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What is known about Protect AI’s later ownership?
A May 2025 report in CIO&Leader said Palo Alto Networks had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Protect AI and that Protect AI was expected to join Prisma AIRS. The report described the deal as subject to customary regulatory approvals and anticipated completion in Palo Alto Networks’ first fiscal quarter of 2026. That expected closing period has passed, but the available reporting here does not establish whether the acquisition was completed. Current ownership, product availability, compatibility, customers and pricing therefore should not be inferred from the 2023 product descriptions or that 2025 report.
Quick Recap
What the funding announcement does—and does not—tell readers
- It does establish: Protect AI announced a $35 million Series A in July 2023, led by Evolution Equity Partners, with Salesforce Ventures and four existing investors participating.
- It does not establish: how the capital was ultimately used, the company’s current product lineup or commercial terms, or whether the reported acquisition later closed.
- It is not a consumer purchase story: the reporting concerns enterprise security software, not a personal-finance product or physical item for individual buyers.
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