Fiddler AI vs Protect AI

Fiddler AI is an AI observability and security platform founded in 2018 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, by Krishna Gade, Amit Paka, and Manoj Cheenath. Fiddler focuses on production monitoring — drift, performance, fairness, explainability — and has extended into LLM observability and security for compound and agentic AI systems. Fiddler raised a $30M Series C in January 2026, bringing total funding to $100M.

Protect AI was a Seattle-based MLSecOps company founded in 2022 by Ian Swanson, Daryan Dehghanpisheh, and Badar Ahmed that built a comprehensive AI and ML security platform. The platform comprised three main products — Guardian (model scanning and supply-chain security), Recon (AI red teaming), and Layer (runtime monitoring) — operating on a unified platform. The company was backed by 17,000+ security researchers via its huntr community and partnered with Hugging Face on threat research. Protect AI was acquired by Palo Alto Networks on July 22, 2025 and its technology has been integrated into Prisma AIRS (AI Runtime Security), Palo Alto's comprehensive AI security platform. Prior to acquisition the company had raised $108.5M total ($14M seed in December 2022, $35M Series A in July 2023, $60M Series B in August 2024), all led by Evolution Equity Partners.