Australian AI startup Redactive raises $7.5 million for expansion

Australian AI engineering and security startup Redactive Software Pty. Ltd. today announced it has raised $7.5 million in new funding to expand its headcount, boost its marketing efforts, and expand into the U.S.

Founded in 2023 by Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, former Atlassian Corp. product managers, and Lucas Sargent, a former independent machine learning engineer, Redactive is a software platform that aims to solve AI engineering and security challenges for enterprise software teams.

“Redactive started with a question,” Pankevicius explains. “What if we first took the enterprise’s needs around information security, privacy, and permissioned access control and then turned that into an easy-to-adopt development platform for software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features or products that could pass information security reviews seamlessly and get to production really quickly?”

Redactive’s platform is designed to simplify the discovery of information needed to personalize generative AI applications using proprietary or customer data. The company offers an application programming interface that supports data synchronization, document fragmentation, model embedding, vector storage, and permissioned live business data ingestion.

The platform offers what it calls a “virtual AI engineer,” eliminating the data engineering expertise that developers must acquire, deploy, and maintain to build scalable and secure AI-enhanced applications for customer or productivity use cases.

Redactive claims to be the only developer platform that addresses the AI ​​engineering and security skills gap in enterprise software engineering teams by equipping enterprises with technology that can navigate rigorous security requirements and connect to fragmented data sources to reliably and securely deliver custom generative AI applications to production.

Although relatively young, Redactive is already seeing solid growth from large enterprises looking to leverage the productivity benefits of Generative AI while ensuring their security, data flows and intellectual property remain theirs. In Australia, Redactive counts two major financial services institutions among its clients.

The seed round was led by Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures Pty. Ltd., with participation from Atlassian Ventures LLC and Zapier Inc.

“We see significant market demand from large enterprise customers, especially banks, insurance companies, and other regulated industries, to build their AI strategy in a secure way,” Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis, said of the round. “We also liked the DNA of the Atlassian team, the commercial instincts, and the distribution relationships with Zapier and other partners at this early stage of Redactive’s life.”

Image: Redactive