Zenity raises $38M to secure enterprise AI copilots and low-code app development – SiliconANGLE

Zenity Ltd., a platform that secures artificial intelligence and low-code app development, said today it raised $38 million in early-stage funding to grow its platform and assist enterprise companies as AI and low-code programming is adopted more broadly.

The Series B round was led by Third Point Ventures and DTCP. Existing investors Intel Capital Corp. and Vertex Ventures also participated, bringing the total raised by the company to over $55 million, including $16.5 million raised in September 2023 led by Intel Capital.

Established in 2021, Zenity started in the low-code/no-code application security platform industry by providing companies with a way to detect and manage secrets and vulnerabilities. The company provides security management tools for app security posture management, or ASPM, and AI security posture management, or AISPM. Under these models, businesses can centralize visibility and inventory of copilots and AI applications created across Microsoft, Salesforce and more across their system.

The platform allows users to secure enterprise copilots and AI agents to detect and prevent suspicious and malicious activities in real time, to prevent bad actors from using them as attack surfaces. For example, it can help information technology and security teams prevent and intercept promptware, an emerging threat to AI systems that attempts to jailbreak generative AI copilots using malicious prompts. It also allows policy authorization and custom setups for data security and to prevent leaking information through AI and low-code apps.

The same system can help detect data poisoning, where maliciously hidden instructions might be inserted into real-time data before they reach a copilot through outside information. This can happen because of a system called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, which is used to update AI systems with up-to-date information to keep responses accurate, but it can also retrieve sources that might have been “poisoned” with dangerous information manipulated by bad actors.

“The future of work is now,” said Zenity co-founder and Chief Executive Ben Kliger. “For the first time, large enterprises are on the cutting edge by placing the power of AI and low-code at all users’ fingertips, meaning anyone can now use and build AI agents and business applications to get more done.”

Kliger argued that due to the rapid adoption of AI apps through low-code development, this means the need for powerful purpose-built security solutions for IT teams is now at an all-time high.

Zenity’s own research showed that the average large enterprise company had nearly 80,000 apps with built-in AI copilots or AI-powered automation using low-code development platforms. Of those, nearly 63% contained some security vulnerability.

The use of AI tools is only increasing across the enterprise as workforces continue to find themselves learning to adjust to the new paradigm. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, nearly 65% of respondents reported that organizations regularly used generative AI, nearly double the 33% in the previous report 10 months ago.

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