Lakera vs Prediction Guard

Lakera is a Zurich-based AI security company founded in 2021 by former Google, Meta, and aerospace engineers. The company provides the Lakera Guard platform, which offers real-time prompt injection prevention, data leakage protection, jailbreak detection, and AI agent security for enterprise generative AI deployments. It operates across workforce AI security, AI agent security, and AI red teaming, with sub-50ms runtime latency and a SaaS-first, API-first architecture. Lakera is the creator of Gandalf, a widely used AI security educational game with over 1 million players and 80M+ prompts collected, which provides a continuously updated threat intelligence database. The company is cited in the OWASP LLM and GenAI Security Landscape Guide 2025, recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2024 Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI (TRiSM), and had Lakera's CEO join the World Economic Forum 2024 alongside Yann LeCun and others. Named customers include Dropbox and a top-3 US bank.

Prediction Guard sells a self-hosted "sovereign AI control plane" for regulated organizations. It sits between applications and the models, agents and MCP tools they call, and applies access, safety and policy controls to each request inside the customer's own infrastructure. The company was founded in 2023 in Lafayette, Indiana; CEO Daniel Whitenack is a co-founder. It raised a $3.7 million seed round led by Sovereign Capital in May 2025, and Noblis Ventures made a strategic investment of undisclosed size in July 2025. At the time of the seed round it had eight employees and said it had 18 customers in health care, defense, transportation and manufacturing. The platform registers each agent with an identity and role and limits it to the models and tools that role needs. Runtime controls include PII masking, prompt injection detection, toxicity filtering, input sanitization, MCP tool scoping and human-in-the-loop approval; requests that fail a policy are blocked and logged. It produces an exportable AI bill of materials (CycloneDX) of models, guardrails and MCP servers, runs model security scans and streams security events to SIEM tools such as Splunk, Datadog and Grafana. Applications call it through OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs. It deploys into a customer VPC on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, on Kubernetes on premises, or air-gapped. Prediction Guard says its control overhead is under 200 ms per request. **AI compliance coverage** Prediction Guard says its policies align with the NIST AI RMF, NIST AI 600-1, the OWASP Top 10 for LLM and agentic applications, OMB M-26-04 and AIUC-1, with one-click baselines and an exportable "proof of alignment" for the NIST AI RMF. A company blog post (August 2026) adds the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001. The same post labels its OWASP mapping "self-published" and not independently verified, and notes that the audit log records enforcement events rather than full replayable traces. We found no published control-by-control mapping. The homepage shows badges for a SOC 2 Type 2 report by Sensiba and HIPAA compliance; there is no public trust center. **Who it's for** Regulated enterprises and public sector bodies that want AI guardrails and agent controls to run inside their own network, including disconnected environments. It is sold to government through Carahsoft. Its homepage quotes executives at Noblis (also an investor), SimWerx and iBase-t.