A stealthy cybersecurity company is planning a Triangle office.
Protect AI, which launched out of stealth mode last week with a $13.5 million funder, has 15 employees – the bulk of them in its hometown of Seattle. But it’s building up satellite locations in both Raleigh and Dallas.
In Raleigh, that “satellite location” is Chris King, the firm’s head of product. Long term, the firm expects to have an actual office in Raleigh.
“The Triangle is a killer place for talent,” King said in an interview.
Protect AI protects machine learning and artificial intelligence technology. The company plans to lead a new market segment within security called MLSecOps – which it describes as a new practice in application security that involves introducing security earlier in the machine learning model development life cycle. Its seed funding round was co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures. Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures and Aviso Ventures participated.
Practitioners of machine learning typically use notebooks to create and share documents containing live code, data and visualizations. But they can introduce security risks and, according ot the company, current cybersecurity products don’t provide coverage of those tools. Protect AI’s first product aims to fill that gap.
The company is staffing up. According to what CEO Ian Swanson told the Puget Sound Business Journal, the plan is to hit 50 employees before the end of next year. And while most of those will be in Seattle, Raleigh will be part of the growth story, King said.
The firm will start slow, but King wouldn’t be surprised to see a team start to develop by the second half of next year. The vision for the Raleigh office is to start with a product team, though with the area's concentration of talent the firm is also considering staffing up locally in security and machine learning, he said.
And engineering – while focused in its headquarters city of Seattle, is also hiring for remote positions.
King, a Duplin County native, sees the Triangle as a key region for attracting talent. The North Carolina State University graduate has a number of firms on his resume, from IBM (NYSE: IBM) to NetApp to Amazon Web Services (Nasdaq: AMZN).
Daryan Dehghanpisheh, co-founder of Protect AI, was a colleague at AWS. When King heard Dehghanpisheh’s pitch, he jumped at the opportunity, he said.
“I really wanted to get into the actual building of a product,” he said.