CalypsoAI vs Giskard

CalypsoAI was an AI security company founded in the US in 2018 by Neil Serebryany, its first CEO; it describes itself as founded in Silicon Valley, and its early press releases carry Washington datelines. It began with software for testing, validating and monitoring AI and machine learning models for national security, finance and other regulated customers, and moved to securing generative AI with CalypsoAI Moderator in 2023. Donnchadh Casey became CEO in August 2024. In October 2024 CalypsoAI named Dublin its global co-headquarters, alongside a US headquarters in New York; IDA Ireland says the CEO, the CTO and most of its R&D were based in Dublin. Paladin Capital Group led its $13 million Series A (July 2020) and a $23 million Series A-1 (June 2023), and F5 says it raised more than $40 million in venture funding. Investors also included Lockheed Martin Ventures and Hakluyt Capital. F5 announced on September 11, 2025 that it would acquire CalypsoAI for $180 million in purchase consideration, mostly cash. F5's 10-Q says the deal closed on September 26, 2025 and records $145.2 million in cash consideration. CalypsoAI is no longer sold separately: calypsoai.com now redirects to F5's AI Guardrails page. F5 introduced F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team when it announced the close, and made both generally available in January 2026. Buyers should evaluate those products. **What it sold** By 2025 CalypsoAI sold an inference security platform with two main products. Inference Defend checked prompts and responses in real time to block prompt injection, jailbreaks and sensitive data leakage, using custom scanners that could be versioned, tested and enforced per project. Inference Red-Team ran automated and agent-driven multi-turn attacks, drawing on more than 10,000 new attack prompts a month, and produced a risk score. The platform logged AI interactions for audit, sent logs to Splunk, and ran as SaaS, on premises or hybrid. In August 2025 CalypsoAI said an on-premises version of Red-Team, for organizations with strict data residency or air-gapped requirements, would soon be available in early access. **Frameworks** In August 2025 CalypsoAI added an EU AI Act scanner package to Inference Defend, covering four Article 5 prohibited-practice categories: manipulation, social scoring, biometric data harvesting and surveillance. F5's deal announcement said its governance features help customers meet GDPR and EU AI Act requirements. We found no CalypsoAI mapping to the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001.

Giskard is a Paris-based company founded in 2021 by Alex Combessie, Jean-Marie John-Mathews and Andrei Avtomonov. Combessie and John-Mathews are now co-CEOs, and Giskard says its co-founders previously built AI systems at Dataiku and Thales. It sells software and services for testing and securing LLM agents. Its first funding round, €1.5 million led by Elaia with Bessemer Venture Partners, was announced in December 2022. Giskard says it also received a €3 million strategic investment through the European Commission's EIC Accelerator in 2023 and a €3 million Bpifrance grant in 2024 for LLM evaluation research with Mistral AI, Artefact, INA and BnF. CORDIS lists a €2.5 million EU contribution to its EIC project, which ran from September 2023 to August 2025. Giskard Hub is the paid platform. Continuous red teaming runs multi-turn attacks that adapt to the agent's answers, generated from the company's own documents and knowledge bases. It tests for hallucinations, stereotypes and discrimination, harmful content, disclosure of personal information and prompt injection. Testing is black-box: the agent only needs an API endpoint, and coverage is limited to text-to-text conversational agents. The Hub also schedules agent evaluations and manages test datasets, custom checks and human review, with alerts, SSO, role-based access and audit logs. It runs as SaaS, in a private cloud or on premises, with EU or US data processing. Giskard Guards, launched in April 2026, is a runtime guardrail layer that runs in the customer's infrastructure. It inspects prompts, responses, tool calls and multi-step reasoning, and its policies are written as code in OPA/Rego. Giskard also sells AI security audits that end in a go/no-go report, and it is offering a free trial of a new Agentic Red Teamer to a limited number of users. The open-source library is Apache 2.0 licensed. Version 3, a rewrite for multi-turn agent testing, became stable in August 2026. Version 2 is no longer actively maintained, and tabular models have no v3 equivalent. Giskard also publishes Phare, an LLM safety benchmark launched in February 2025 with Google DeepMind as research partner. Logos on its site include BNP Paribas, AXA, BPCE, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, Michelin, Decathlon, L'Oréal and Doctolib. **AI compliance coverage** Guards includes an EU AI Act policy pack for prohibited practices such as social scoring and real-time biometric identification, and Giskard says Guards covers OWASP LLM risks. It doesn't map its products to the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center, run on Bastion, lists GDPR and a SOC 2 Type 2 report and shows HIPAA as in progress. **Who it's for** Enterprises, especially in European banking and insurance, that run customer-facing LLM agents and want testing and runtime controls they can deploy on premises.