Resistant AI raises funding to protect AI systems from adversarial attacks

Resistant AI, a security company that helps to protect AI systems from targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning attacks and advanced fraud, has raised $2.75 million in funding. The company will use the funding for product development and hiring, including the expansion of its sales and support function for financial services and e-commerce customers. The round was co-led by Index Ventures (Jan Hammer) and Credo Ventures (Ondrej Bartos and Vladislav Jez) with participation of Seedcamp. Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath, Michal Pechoucek, CTO of Avast and other angel investors have also invested. Ondrej Bartos joins the board of directors on behalf of the investors. With the increased reliance on AI, malicious actors are actively exploring vulnerabilities which, because of the very nature of AI, are much harder to detect. Working with customers in financial services, fintech and e-commerce, Resistant AI ensures that the AI-driven online and automated processes that these companies rely on, have not been compromised. Martin Rehak, Founder & CEO, Resistant AI: "Historically, all systems that make high-value financial decisions become targeted. This is already happening with the automated systems deployed by our fintech and financial customers and we are here to protect them."  Resistant AI is deployed as an additional protection on top of AI systems, and

• protects credit risk scoring, payment systems, fraud detection, anti-money laundering and customer onboarding systems;
• detects forged documents submitted to mislead or manipulate automated processes;
• discovers relationships between seemingly unrelated transactions to identify advanced fraud designed specifically to evade the current fraud prevention systems, such as synthetic identities, bust-out fraud, approval boundary probing and many others;
• defends against strategic attacks where the attackers aim to copy the underlying model or the sensitive data used to train the model.

Michal Smida, CEO of Twisto payments, described the ResistantAI service as follows: “Resistant AI is a critical part of our security infrastructure, giving us the confidence that we can rely on our machine-learning-based credit scoring system, which we use to automate the approval of credit payments. And it is because of Resistant AI that we don’t need to put in excessive security measures and make the customer experience much better.” Jan Hammer, General Partner at Index Ventures added: "Automation, efficiency and reliability are cornerstones of financial innovation. As machine learning takes more and more nuanced financial decisions, it needs to be protected. And this is not true only in finance, but the attacks will rapidly spread to other domains as well. Bad actors are ready to take advantage of every vulnerability. More activity is taking place online today than ever before, a trend further accelerated by Covid-19.  The need for solutions such as those from ResistantAI has never been greater." Ondrej Bartos, General Partner of Credo Ventures, who joins the Resistant AI board of directors with this round commented: "We at Credo are always delighted to back founders of our past successful portfolio companies. Therefore we’re excited to co-lead the investment into Resistant AI whose founders we’ve worked with closely in the past years and in our view have proven deep technology expertise and foresight which is exactly the toolset they need to tackle security of AI decisions."