Silicon Valley's Operant AI enters Indian market to secure AI systems in real-time

Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity AI startup Operant AI is entering the Indian market, introducing its Runtime AI Application Defense Platform to safeguard AI systems against emerging threats.

The startup provides 3D Runtime Defense for cloud and AI environments, by addressing critical vulnerabilities in new AI systems. It offers real-time security solutions to detect and block threats such as prompt injection, rogue agents, data poisoning, and data exfiltration.

“Operant AI is a runtime application protection company specialising in the cloud and AI space. We secure all cloud and AI applications from the get go in a holistic and multi layer way. We don't just stop at detections that we discover…we also place defense controls in real time in the application to protect them from live attacks,” Priyanka Tembey, co-founder and CTO of Operant AI tells YourStory. 

AI adoption in India has been at an all time high, with several sectors such as fintech, healthcare, and enterprise software increasingly ramping up with new offerings.

Traditional security tools like code scanning and firewalls fall short against AI-powered threats, including malicious prompts and unauthorised API access. This means that new security approaches that block attacks in real-time are required to protect both AI systems and the cloud environments that are connected to them. 

Around 92% of Indian executives have identified cybersecurity threats, including hacking and AI-specific vulnerabilities, as a key concern, while 91% worry about privacy risks tied to sensitive data in AI systems, reveals a Deloitte report. 

The startup is engaging with industry leaders and customers in Bengaluru, Pune, and Ahmedabad this month as it strengthens its foothold in the Indian market. It also plans to explore other key tech hubs and recruit talent in cities such as Hyderabad and Delhi. 

“The technical challenges faced by companies that are using AI or building AI components to solve important business use cases are somewhat similar across the US and India. India is also innovating really fast, building its own technology for use cases such as fraud detection modeling, in fintech or banks,” says Ashely Roof, Co-founder of Operant AI. 

“We started focusing on India after talking to several security leaders working for American companies based here. But we soon realised that the Indian market itself, especially sectors like fintech and banking, faces exactly the same challenges and shares a similar urgency around innovation,” she adds. 

Founded in 2021 by Vrajesh Bhavsar, Dr. Priyanka Tembey, and Ashley Roof, Operant AI is a provider of a runtime AI application protection platform, securing each layer of live cloud and AI applications. The platform claims to detect and defend against more than 80% of the OWASP Top 10 most critical attacks across APIs, cloud environments, and large language models (LLMs).

In September, Operant AI raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SineWave Ventures and Felicis, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Massive, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, alongside angel investors. This round brought the company’s total funding to $13.5 million.

Operant AI was recently recognised as a representative vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM) in February.