Confident Security exits stealth with $4.2M to deliver confidential AI beyond Apple-level privacy

And we have our next guest joining the stream. I'm going to guess that it's Jonathan, but I'm gonna make sure once he joins. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Did I get that right? Yes, Jonathan. Security. A lot of people call me J Mo, actually. So, what's up? Uh, give us the news.

I hear we uh you got some good news. Break it down for us. Yes. Uh, we are coming out of stealth launching a new company called Confident Security. Um, it's about providing confidential AI. Did you raise any money? We raised 4. 2 million with decibel. Congratulations. Spark Commons. Congratulations. There we go.

Uh why is confidential AI important? I can I can imagine a bunch of reasons, but uh what was the uh kind of catalyst to start the company?

Yeah, I think you know uh unless we do some work, I think we're going to have Cambridge Analyt Analytica times like a million essentially unless uh there's just too much incentive for folks to train on data and people need to care about privacy.

So we thought uh you know Apple shouldn't just be the only ones providing privacy, everyone else should do it, too. Give me some concrete examples of how to use the product. What data specifically am I keeping secure?

Is it stuff that's on the web or uh because I feel like if I have an air gap data center somewhere with a whole bunch of hard drives uh there's no crawlers that are getting to that. That's right. Um if you are taking that air if you're using the air gap data and you have your own GPUs and it's completely in there.

You might care about various users inside your air gap environment not seeing all the data. You know standard like top secret versus secret type of stuff. Mhm. But this is, you know, you're you're an employee at Fizer and you upload a PDF to OpenAI that describes how you do drug discovery.

Maybe you care about that secret. Maybe you care about how it's going to be used. And after the recent OpenAI court case, uh, where they were forced to retain deleted data, you know, I think people are being a little cautious.

So, how does your uh, so how how do you actually plan in plugging in to companies like how does the product actually get installed and used on a day-to-day basis? So, it requires two parties.

uh one party who's running the server uh to install our wrapper around it and then the other party who's like making requests to that server to use our SDK and it essentially you can think of it as like a very specialized form of encryption um where you can only decrypt the data that you've submitted to the server uh if you've met some constraints like you don't log the data you don't train on the data no one has access to the data all that type of stuff and is that just like enforced at a at an engineering level or enforced at a legal little contractual level.

It is a technical level. Great question. Um, and that's what's different, right? You can make promises that say you want train on the data, but we make it's very it's a technical guarantee and it's essentially a bunch of fancy cryptography that makes that guarantee.

So, we actually offer unlimited liability and indemnification for data breaches and misuse because we're so convinced that you cannot we cannot see the data. No third party can see the data. Yeah. So, uh what's the go to market? Like you you mentioned example of like a big biotech company.

Is that the the most obvious customer or are there other segments that are logical? Um biotech, legal, uh finance, of course, defense and government.

Um and not just not just like pure defense, but you know, local jurisdictions, uh states, they're all trying to figure out how to deal with uh you know, freedom of information. When have you made something public? Did you was it too soon? Um, this helps, you know, manage all that stuff.

Uh, privilege for lawyers, same problem there. Trying to figure out, well, if I give my data open air, have I disclosed it and it's no longer subject to privilege? Sense. Uh, super interesting. Close close it out with uh how big is the team? Where is the team size going? What are you hiring for? What comes next?

Um, we're about six people right now and we've been building building building. And now with the launch, we're ready to start selling. And so our focus is bringing on sales people. Yeah. Um I've done two previous companies and I've every time I've learned that I should spend more on sales. So that's what we're doing.

Interesting. Good takeaway. That's good. That there's going to be uh that's the environment that a great sales leader or individual contributor wants to join. I mean it takes a lot of technical CEOs like a while to actually get through that.

So it makes sense that you're in your third company because like Yeah, a lot of people learn that lesson late, right? Awesome. JMO, thank you for joining. Thank you so much for come back on when you have news and uh thank you for doing this. We will talk to you soon. Y cheers. Let me tell you about Wander.

Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service. It's a It's a vacation home, but better.