Stop blocking, start enabling — welcome, SurePath AI!
Generative AI (GenAI) rocketed onto the scene in 2023. Ever since, enterprises have faced a critical dilemma: go all-in with this transformative technology, accepting significant security and compliance risks, or fall behind. SurePath AI has emerged to solve this predicament, enabling secure and compliant GenAI adoption without hindering innovation.
Given the risks, enterprises today either completely block the usage of GenAI models and applications or block everything but privately deployed large language models (LLMs). This means employees cannot explore GenAI’s benefits and utilities, or they find ways around it.
Enterprise executives don’t want either scenario. They are aware of the possible productivity gains in utilizing GenAI apps and don’t want to miss out and fall behind their competitors. They also don’t want to face any regulatory and reputational damage with the misuse of GenAI apps.
Given the high stakes and timely nature of the pain points enterprises are facing today regarding GenAI, the market need for SurePath AI’s product is clear. That’s why we are thrilled to welcome SurePath AI to our portfolio.
Their security platform enables enterprises to interact safely with GenAI models and applications by preventing sensitive or private data from being sent to GenAI models and applications, implementing access controls to control which departments/employees internally can interact with which models and applications, and offering in-depth visibility into employee usage.
Competition is real; but as a long-time enterprise software investor, I’m bullish about SurePath AI for several reasons. First is the vision. SurePath AI isn’t just building a technology platform: the company aims to shape the future of responsible GenAI adoption in business.
Second is their technology. In less than one year, they have achieved key milestones, developing and releasing a robust platform that solves critical business challenges to securing new customers. The platform sits at the network level, a fundamentally different approach from what we’ve seen from the few direct competitors who are building separate standalone applications. Being at the network level allows the company’s platform to control access, inspect requests for sensitive data leaks, and redact sensitive data found in requests to public models, enabling firms to enhance security and reduce the risk of data leakage.
SurePath AI is also the perfect complement to Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platforms. SASE solutions are great for basic allow/block operations, but GenAI requires a more nuanced approach. SurePath AI goes beyond SASE by preventing Shadow AI, providing a specialized policy engine, mitigating risks, and providing deeper insights.
The SurePath AI team is impressive as well. Co-founder and CEO Casey Bleeker was previously VP of Cloud at CDW. Before that, he was at Cisco for more than five years. Casey is a visionary leader adept at understanding customer problems and building products to solve them.
Casey’s Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Randy Birdsall, was previously a senior director of product at Cisco. Randy managed application security and observability groups there for five years. He knows enterprise sales inside and out and is a resilient and humble product leader.
For these reasons, I’m excited to announce that Uncork Capital has led SurePath’s $5 million seed financing and are delighted to be working alongside our friends at Operator Collective. The company’s total funding is now $6.3 million, following a pre-seed round by a collection of angels and individual investors.
Welcome Casey, Randy, and the entire SurePath AI team to the Uncork portfolio. Our bet: the SurePath AI team’s vision, network-level product strategy, and enterprise go-to-market experience will propel them to become a leader in this fast-growing space.
We look forward to working with the SurePathers in their next phase of growth!
