companies

HiddenLayer

AI/ML security platform that scans models for supply-chain threats and defends production models against adversarial and prompt-based attacks.

HiddenLayer was founded in 2022 in Austin, Texas by Chris "Tito" Sestito, Tanner Burns, and James Ballard. Sestito had led threat research at Cylance, where an adversarial inference attack against the company's own Windows executable-scanning model let malicious binaries slip past detection across its entire customer base — an episode that became the direct motivation for building a company focused on securing AI models rather than the applications around them. The company raised a $50 million Series A in September 2023 led by M12 (Microsoft's venture fund) and Moore Strategic Ventures, with participation from IBM Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Booz Allen Ventures, and has been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in AI security. Its AISec Platform covers the full model lifecycle — supply chain scanning, runtime defense, and adversarial red teaming — and integrates with the Azure AI model catalog to validate open-source models before they reach production.

Founded

2022

Headquarters

Austin, United States

Sector

infrastructure