Lakera vs Robust Intelligence

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.

Robust Intelligence was an AI security company founded in 2019 by Yaron Singer, a Harvard computer science and applied mathematics professor who became its CEO, and Kojin Oshiba, his former student. It was based in San Francisco and also had operations in Israel. Sequoia Capital led its seed and Series A rounds ($14 million combined, announced in October 2020), and Tiger Global and Sequoia led a $30 million Series B in December 2021, bringing its funding to about $44 million. Cisco Investments was also an investor. Cisco announced its intent to acquire Robust Intelligence on August 26, 2024 and completed the deal on September 24, 2024. The price was not disclosed. Robust Intelligence is no longer a separate product: its technology is the core of Cisco AI Defense, which Cisco unveiled on January 15, 2025 and said would be available that March. Buyers should evaluate Cisco AI Defense. **What it sold** Robust Intelligence started with RIME (the Robust Intelligence Model Engine), built around an "AI Firewall" that wraps a model, checks its inputs and outputs, and stress-tests it. Its later platform had two parts. AI Validation automatically tested models for security and safety vulnerabilities (such as prompt injection and data poisoning) before and after deployment, scanned open-source models, data and files for supply chain vulnerabilities such as malicious pickle files, recommended guardrails and produced reports. AI Protection applied those guardrails in production. It ran as SaaS in Robust Intelligence's private AWS VPC or as a hybrid deployment with a self-hosted data plane, and it integrated with observability and SIEM tools such as Splunk, Datadog, CrowdStrike and AppDynamics. The company also co-developed the AI Risk Database and said it co-authored NIST's adversarial machine learning taxonomy and contributed to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. **Frameworks** Its product page says tests were mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, MITRE ATLAS, NIST's adversarial machine learning taxonomy, the EU AI Act and the White House executive order on AI. It does not mention the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Cisco AI Defense maps to the NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. **Status** The robustintelligence.com site is still online and describes AI Validation and AI Protection without mentioning Cisco. We found no current way to buy Robust Intelligence separately from Cisco.