Redactive AI Secures $11.5M AUD Seed Funding To Enable Software Team To Build Secure Generative AI Agents

Redactive, a pioneering developer platform that solves for the missing AI engineering and security skillsets lacking within enterprise software teams, announced today its $11.5M AUD seed round co-led by Felicis and Blackbird, alongside Atlassian Ventures and automation unicorn Zapier.
 

Redactive was founded by ex-Atlassian Product Managers Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, who spent the prior 5+ years building developer platforms for Fortune 500 enterprise customers, and AI Engineer Lucas Sargent, who had pioneered AI/ML technologies within regulated, listed enterprises for the prior 5+ years.

Amid the generative AI boom last year, the team recognized 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. 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," Andrew explained.

“Redactive started with a question” continued Andrew, “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?’”.

Redactive’s early adopters are large enterprises who are looking to take advantage of the productivity benefits of Generative AI, whilst ensuring their security, data flows, and intellectual property remain their own. In Australia alone, Redactive is actively used by two large financial services institutions, assisting them both to scale their generative AI use cases to over 500 employees each.

“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. 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 Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis. “We also loved the Atlassian DNA of the team, commercial instincts, and distribution relationships with Zapier and other partners so early in Redactive's life stage"

AI-native developers and frontier technology companies including Zapier have taken note of Redactive. Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and investor in Redactive noted ‘With Zapier AI bots, users told us it was critical to control real time access to their data. This is hard at scale as third party data sources all do permissions differently! Redactive has a super unique approach that avoids having to build expensive and slow permission syncs’.”

Redactive AI’s platform simplifies information retrieval to personalise Generative AI applications with proprietary or customer data. The company 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 will use its seed funding to rapidly grow the team across engineering, customer success, and marketing and work directly with enterprises on their Generative AI initiatives. The team also looks to expand its footprint and begin hiring in the US.

“We’ve been impressed with the speed Redactive has been able to move at to solve critical challenges for AI native application developers and compliant enterprises” said Blackbird Ventures General Partner Michael Tolo. “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’

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