by Steven Scheer
JERUSALEM: Israeli cybersecurity startup Apex, which focuses on protecting the rapid operate of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, said on Thursday it has received an undisclosed investment from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In total, Apex raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Index Ventures, Altman and others, it says. Altman did not immediately comment on the news.
Apex said it was conducting tests with a number of Fortune 500 companies and investment firms and was close to finalizing paid deals. The fresh funds will be used to accelerate product development, hiring and marketing, the company said.
As demand for AI tools – including OpenAI’s ChatGPT – grows to facilitate people get things done much faster, users are looking for ways to protect their data and prevent threats and inappropriate data from entering their systems.
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“There is a completely fresh segment of threats and risks associated with artificial intelligence models. It starts with data leaks and problems on the data side. It’s about privacy, compliance and what comes back to the organization,” Matan Derman, CEO of Apex, told Reuters.
He added that this was a key moment for the cybersecurity industry, which until now had focused on preventing and blocking unwanted access.
“We started Apex to build out the additional layers of security that enterprises need to implement (AI),” he said. “We will try to go as far as we can.”
Israel is a global leader in cybersecurity, with hundreds of startups.
Ten months ago, Derman co-founded Apex with Tomer Avni, whom he met when they both served as officers in the Israeli army’s elite intelligence unit 8200. Since then, the company has been operating in the so-called stealth mode, cooperating secretly with selected companies.
“Every board of directors, every CEO, every investor and every entrepreneur is talking about AI and how AI can be used,” Avni said. “So the need for security is much more imminent.”
Avni said artificial intelligence is the latest development in major technological changes that began with the advent of personal computers and then moved to the web and cloud, each of which required additional security.
“Artificial intelligence is likely to be bigger than all these (previous) revolutions,” he said, “because artificial intelligence is just everywhere.”
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