A developer platform created by former Atlassian product managers to tackle the missing AI engineering and security skillsets in enterprise software engineering teams has raised $11.5 million in a Seed round.
The funding for Melbourne-based Redactive AI was co-led by Californian VC Felicis and local VC Blackbird, supported by Atlassian Ventures and US automated workflows giant Zapier.
Redactive was founded in September 2023 by Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, who spent several years building developer platforms for Fortune 500 enterprise customers, with AI Engineer Lucas Sargent, a pioneer of AI/ML technologies in regulated, listed enterprises.
The trio understand the importance of navigating the strict security requirements of major businesses and how to reliably and safely connect to fragmented data sources to ship bespoke generative AI applications. Redactive enables software teams to build permissions-aware, secure generative AI agents and applications with its enterprise-grade developer platform.
Pankevicius said that amidst a generative AI boom last year, they recognised a gap in the market’s approach to AI application development.
“The open-source community was filled with incredible projects that showed what this next generation of AI could do,” he said.
“We saw first-hand how enterprises with fragmented data repositories and complex security controls would struggle to adopt bespoke generative AI agents and applications without their very specific, dynamic security needs being fulfilled to get these use cases into production.”
Large enterprises looking to embrace the productivity benefits of Generative AI have been Redactive’s earlier adopters – including Australian financial services institutions – because it whilst ensures their security, data flows, and intellectual property remain their own.
Pankevicius said Redactive is a team’s enterprise security aware AI engineer, and began with a question.
“What if we considered the information security, privacy and permissioned access control needs of an enterprise first, and reversed that out into a simple to adopt developer platform for software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features or products that can seamlessly get through information security reviews and truly make their way into production quickly?” he said.
The platform simplifies information retrieval to personalise Generative AI applications with proprietary or customer data. The startup offers a single API to handles data syncing, document chunking, embedding models, vector stores, and live permissioned fetching of business data that end users can use to make real-time business decisions, rather than relying on batched data that is out of date quickly.
Redactive.AI currently has 10 people based in Melbourne, and plans to increase that by 50% with expansion into the US market from San Fransisco later this year. The Seed capital is earmarked towards growing the team across engineering, customer success, and marketing.
Felicis general partner Victoria Treyger said they loved the Atlassian DNA of the team, as well as their commercial instincts, and distribution relationships with Zapier and others
“When we met Andrew and Alex, we were immediately impressed with their vision to make AI real for enterprises with a critical focus on security and permissions,” she said.
“We see significant market pull from large enterprise customers, especially banks, insurance companies, and other companies in regulated industries, to build their AI strategy in a secure way,” said “
Blackbird general partner Michael Tolo was impressed by the speed they’d moved at to solve critical challenges for AI native application developers and compliant enterprises.
“It’s a testament to the deep expertise and thoughtfulness the founding team has to tackle the hidden security and governance challenges software teams get stuck on to be able to truly deliver production grade, secure Gen AI applications,” he said.
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