While privacy regulations, such as the GDPR, the Indian data protection bill among others, were already hard to comply by, generative AI has made things even more difficult. And they take a turn for the worse when data privacy is talked about in sectors such as financial services and health, wherein protecting sensitive consumer/patient data is a top priority.
The rampant and massively accelerated use of generative AI across industries (thanks to what we can now call a post-ChatGPT era) means that enterprises are always scrambling to ensure data privacy. LLMs present unprecedented privacy and compliance risks for enterprises. It has been widely shown that LLMs can easily memorize sensitive data from their training dataset. Malicious actors can exploit this vulnerability to extract users’ personally identifiable information and sensitive contract values with carefully designed prompts, posing a major data security risk for the enterprise.
DynamoFL, a SanFran/Bangalore based data privacy startup, is using generative AI to bank on this growing business need for enterprises, and has now received $15Mn to fund its solution. The latest Series A round was co-led by Nexus Venture Partners and Canapi Ventures, with participation from Formus Capital and Soma Capital. Noted angel investors also participated, such as Vojtech Jina, Apple’s privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) lead, Tolga Erbay, Head of Governance, Risk and Compliance at Dropbox and Charu Jangid, product leader at Snowflake among others.
Founded by two MIT PhDs last year, DynamoFL’s privacy evaluation suite provides out-of-the-box testing for data extraction vulnerabilities and automated documentation to ensure enterprises’ LLMs are secure and compliant. Their end-to-end suite – Privacy Evaluation Suite, Differential Privacy, and/or Federated Learning modules individually helps organizations implement enterprise-grade, private, and secure in-house Generative AI solutions at a fraction of the time and cost.
The company raised $4.2M in a seed round last year bringing the total amount raised to $19.3M.
DynamoFL CEO and co-founder Vaikkunth Mugunthan said, “This investment validates our philosophy that AI platforms need to be built with a focus on privacy and security from day one in order to scale in enterprise use cases. It also reflects the growing interest and demand for in-house Generative AI solutions across industries.”
The company already claims to have several Fortune 500 clients in its roster, with more set to join in as it scales its solution with the latest fundraise. DynamoFL’s machine learning privacy research team recently showed how personal information – including sensitive details about C-Suite executives, Fortune 500 corporations, and private contract values – could be easily extracted from a fine-tuned GPT-3 model.
