Kindo has successfully raised $7 million in seed funding for the launch of its secure AI productivity platform for businesses.

Kindo’s platform empowers businesses by harnessing the power of any AI model, be it commercial, open source, or proprietary. By integrating AI into their workflows, companies can significantly improve productivity while ensuring security, compliance, and centralized governance, said Ron Williams, CEO of Kindo, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Riot Ventures led the round, with participation from Eniac Ventures and RRE Ventures. Other notable investors include Marlinspike Partners, Flexcap Ventures, New Era Ventures, Scooter Braun, Andrew Peterson (founder of Signal Sciences), and Dave Politis (founder of BetterCloud).

Founded in September 2022 by Williams and tech industry veterans, Kindo brings together the expertise of former chief security officers and IT executives from tech unicorns Bird Rides, Clover Health, and Riot Games, as well as talents from Google, OpenAI, and Square. The company’s mission is to deliver enterprise-ready generative AI security, compliance, and centralized management, enabling businesses to leverage the full potential of AI safely and responsibly.

Williams said he was on the pulse of generative AI as it started exploding last year, and he was focused on how open-source versions of the technology hit an inflection point.

“Over my career, it was clear to me that we were getting ready to see a big transition of AI,” he said. “I foresaw a whole bunch of startups are getting ready to get funded. And every time that’s happened before, employees drag a lot of things into the company because of the productivity gains. Then IT security has to sit there and juggle it all until a solution shows up that lets them manage it centrally. That’s what happened with SaaS management tools.”

After seeing that happened multiple times, Williams thought about how to put the right controls in place for data and workflow capabilities to enable businesses to really leverage AI.

With Kindo’s platform, companies gain full visibility and control over the usage of AI within their organization, Williams said. The platform seamlessly connects to over 200 software-as-a-service business applications and allows companies to choose the AI models that best suit their needs, as well as manage the flow of data in and out of AI systems.

“Companies have already witnessed how AI can enhance employee efficiency and productivity,” Williams said. “However, security risks, lack of centralized IT controls, and compliance challenges have hindered many organizations from adopting and scaling AI safely. Kindo’s platform directly addresses these obstacles, providing companies with the means to leverage AI’s full potential easily, safely, and responsibly.”

Key features of the Kindo platform include turn-key secure deployment of any AI model, integration with leading SaaS business applications, and instant access to state-of-the-art conversational AI assistants and AI-powered workflows such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard, Anthropic Claude, and Meta’s open-source LLAMA 2.

Additionally, the platform offers centralized governance of employee access and permissions, audit logs, usage tracking, and analytics for all AI prompts, data, and workflows, as well as robust controls and policies to safeguard company data, intellectual property, and personal information.

Kindo can give more visibility into the tech and whether there are any issues to worry about like compliance or concerns about copyright infringement with the AI models.

“If you don’t trust other models, then we let you run your own model too,” Williams said.

The seed funding will enable Kindo to scale operations and fuel its growth, with a focus on helping businesses enhance the performance and productivity of their employees. By providing a secure and user-friendly environment for AI adoption, Kindo aims to revolutionize the way companies integrate AI into their workflows.

With AI, this workflow is going to be repeatable,” Williams said. “I can pass it around the company, and you can use it, or you can change it for how you want it to be. It’s like a dream list of AI capabilities for the CIO or CSO. And I want it to be Switzerland instead of just one big AI model. That’s what we’ve built.”

Kindo has 13 people.