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HoundDog.ai , a startup that helps developers insure their code does n’t leak out in person identifiable data ( PII),came out of stealth Wednesdayand announced a $ 3.1 million ejaculate round lead-in by E14 , Mozilla Ventures and x / ante , in improver to a number of holy person investors . Unlike other scanning creature , HoundDog in reality looks at the computer code a developer is writing , using both traditional pattern matching and large language models ( LLMs ) to find likely issuance .
HoundDog was founded byAmjad Afanah , who previously co - founded DCHQ , whichwas later acquired by Gridstore(which , to complicate thing , then exchange its name to HyperGrid ) in 2016 . Afanah also co - founded apisec.ai , which is still up and break away , and worked at self - push inauguration Cruise . The aspiration for HoundDog derive during his time at data surety startup Cyral and talk to privacy team there , he told me .
“ When I was at Cyral , we had a plenty of data , ” he articulate . “ What Cyral does — like many others in the data security space — is they focus on product system . They help oneself you discover , classify your structured datum and your databases , and then assist you apply access control condition . But the consuming feedback that I kept hearing from security and secrecy teams alike was : ‘ You eff , it ’s a little too responsive and it does n’t keep up with the changes in the code basis . ’ ”
So HoundDog shift key this process even further left . While it still sits in the uninterrupted integrating flow and not yet in the development environment ( though that may happen in the future tense ) , the idea here is to discover potential data making water before the code is merged . And most significantly , HoundDog does so by looking at the real code , not the data menstruum it produces . “ Our germ of accuracy is the codification bag , ” Afanah said .
Thanks to this , if a growing team starts gather Social Security numbers , for example , HoundDog would kick upstairs a flag and warn the squad about that before the codification is ever fuse ; it would also alert the security team . That could potentially be a major — and costly issue — after all .
The serving presently supports code written in Java , C # , JavaScript and TypeScript , as well as SQL , GraphQL and OpenAPI / Swagger queries . supporting for Python is imminent , the company say .
Afanah noted that a tool like this is becoming especially important in this age of AI - return code , something Replit CEO ( and HoundDog holy person investor ) Amjad Masad also echoed .
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“ As an increasing number of companies turn to AI - bring forth codification to accelerate maturation , plant security good practices and ensuring the certificate of the generated codification becomes essential , ” Masad said . “ HoundDog.ai is leading the way in securing PII data early in the exploitation cycle per second , making it an indispensable constituent of any AI codification propagation work flow . This is the reasonableness I chose to invest in this company . ”
HoundDog itself does apply AI , though , too . It presently relies on OpenAI ’s models to do so , but it ’s important to stress that this is optional . Users who worry about their codification leaving their private repository can also prefer to only rely on the troupe ’s more traditional code scanner .
A major part of HoundDog ’s note value proposition is that it can cut compliance costs for startups thanks to its automated reporting capabilities . The service can automatically generate a phonograph recording of processing action ( RoPA ) . To do this , HoundDog habituate productive AI to generate these report and sends that information to OpenAI . The team does try that only the tokens the service has discovered through its regular electronic scanner are share with OpenAI and that the actual source codification is n’t share .
The company offers alimited complimentary architectural plan , with bear plan start at $ 200 / month for skim up to two repos .
