Giskard vs HiddenLayer

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 Version 2 is no longer actively maintained, and tabular models have no v3 equivalent.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.

HiddenLayer is an Austin, Texas-based AI security company founded in March 2022 by experienced cybersecurity and machine learning professionals. The company provides a comprehensive AI Security Platform covering AI Discovery (automated inventory), AI Supply Chain Security (model scanning for embedded threats), AI Attack Simulation (red teaming), and AI Runtime Security (guardrails and active threat response). The platform is designed to be non-invasive — protecting models without requiring access to raw training data — and integrates with CI/CD, MLOps, data pipelines, and SIEM/SOAR tools. HiddenLayer is recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor for AI Application Security. The company raised $50M in Series A in September 2023, the largest Series A for an AI-focused cybersecurity company at that time, led by M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund) and Moore Strategic Ventures. Customers include enterprises in financial services, US federal government, and technology. Named endorsers include the CISO of the NFL and the former CISO of AIG.