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Sunnyvale - basedBrevianwants to make it easy for business users to build custom AI agents . presently , the party is focus on support teams and security analyst — areas where both the use of goods and services case and preparation sets are well delimitate — but plans to blow up to other areas over time . Brevian is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $ 9 million come funding round , the company told TechCrunch only .
Brevian , which style its name as BREV / ΛN , was founded byVinay Wagh(CEO ) andRam Swaminathan(CTO ) , who come to this startup journey from very different directions . Wagh was previously a product director at Databricks and the read/write head of products atBracket Computing . During his meter at Databricks , he work on getting the company quick to sell to prominent go-ahead and then launch its serverless product , Databricks SQL Serverless . “ That went gallium in February , and I was looking at everything going on , Wagh said . “ When I check ChatGPT and other affair , for me , it was just : how is this applicable in the enterprise ? Instantly , our conjunction was that all these missing pieces are going to be needed . There ’s so much promise , but unless somebody work out this piece , it ’s not going to shape well . That was the brainchild to get out there — there ’s clobber happening . And then I met Ram [ Swaminathan ] through a common friend . ”
While Wagh work out a sight on the data side , Swaminathan ’s setting is on the electronic computer science and machine learning side . After work in academia for a while , he spent nine years at Bell Labs and 17 yr at HP Labs , working on everything from rally theory to cryptanalytics and early machine learning elbow grease . Then he went to LinkedIn , where he headed up the AI trust squad before leaving in tardy 2022 to link up Wagh in constitute Brevian as its CTO .
“ I did n’t really have a product sense , ” he tell me . “ You save report , you drop a line patent — but can you really build a product that can impact a expectant number of the great unwashed ? And LinkedIn was a perfect prey : go there , you assist protect a platform that serves Book of Job and connection to people . That ’s it . It ’s a great shock on companionship . I really enjoy working with production mass and engineering science , and align all these thing and really make value . ”
At the core of all enterprise projects around reproductive AI is security , the team argues . AI marketer require to insure that no personal information news leak , for example . When the company launched , a lot of enterprises decided to ban ChatGPT inside their organizations because there was no way to undertake that employee would n’t feed tender data into the chat prompts .
In its early day , Brevian focused mostly on security measures . “ We speedily turned around model that find [ personally identifiable data ] , ” Wagh explained . “ We noticed that this prompt injection approach vector was increasing , so we built an intention - based system to detect straightaway injectant . And so what we ended up doing at that time [ … ] was pull together all the prompt that break alignment , and we scarper a model across all of them and it was capture all of them . ”
Interestingly , Wagh noted , even today enterprises interest a mass about security in the context of use of large language framework , but they do n’t actually quite know what they are really worried about beyond these escape . The substantial challenge , the squad chop-chop understand , was that what was bind endeavor acceptance back was n’t actually so much security but the challenge of building organization that work out tangible problems for them .
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“ Our vision was to enable business user in the enterprisingness to be able-bodied to expend AI to simplify their everyday task . All of that fit in within the vision to expand from security department and build these AI agent . ”
Brevian ’s seed round was direct by Felicis partner Jake Storm ( and this marks Felicis ’ largest ejaculate stave hitch yet ) . He note that a year ago , everybody was talking about AI infrastructure , but few people were talking about applications — and the importance of securing those . “ 2023 was kind of [ the year of ] AI infra . 2024 is the year of AI apps — and we just feel like they were so far in advance , ” he severalize me .
With this funding round , Brevian aims to accelerate production development and expand its squad to see spring up client demand through its early spill political program .
