HiddenLayer

About

HiddenLayer

HiddenLayer is an artificial intelligence security company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that develops an end-to-end platform for protecting machine learning models against adversarial attacks. The company was founded in 2022 by Chris Sestito, who serves as chief executive officer, Tanner Burns as chief scientist, and Jim Ballard as chief technology officer, all of whom previously responded to one of the first real world attacks against a production machine learning system at Cylance. HiddenLayer closed a 50 million dollar Series A funding round in September 2023 led by M12, the venture arm of Microsoft, and Moore Strategic Ventures, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures, IBM Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Ten Eleven Ventures. Total funding across two rounds has reached 56 million dollars. The company product portfolio spans AI Discovery, AI Supply Chain Security, AI Attack Simulation, AI Runtime Security, model scanning, red teaming, AI guardrails, and agentic protection for MCP-based systems.

HiddenLayer is an artificial intelligence security company that builds an end-to-end defensive platform for enterprise machine learning models, deployed pipelines, and agentic systems. The Austin, Texas company positions its platform as coverage across the full AI lifecycle, from model provenance and supply chain checks through runtime detection of adversarial prompts and data extraction attempts. The company was founded in March 2022 by Chris Sestito, chief executive officer, Tanner Burns, chief scientist, and Jim Ballard, chief technology officer, following the founders' response at Cylance to what has been publicly cited as one of the first real world attacks that exploited a production machine learning system. In September 2023 the company closed a 50 million dollar Series A round led by M12, the corporate venture arm of Microsoft, and Moore Strategic Ventures, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures, IBM Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Ten Eleven Ventures. Total funding across two rounds now stands at 56 million dollars. The product portfolio spans eight areas: AI Discovery, AI Supply Chain Security, AI Attack Simulation, AI Runtime Security, model scanning, red team assessment services, AI guardrails, and agentic protection for Model Context Protocol systems. Gartner has recognized HiddenLayer as an AI Application Security provider.