Lakera vs WitnessAI

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.

WitnessAI is an AI security and governance platform for enterprise AI use by employees and by AI agents. It was founded in 2023 and incubated by Ballistic Ventures. CEO Rick Caccia, previously SVP of marketing at Palo Alto Networks, is the only co-founder the company names. It is based in Mountain View, California, and has raised about $85.5 million in two announced rounds: $27.5 million co-led by GV and Ballistic Ventures (May 2024) and $58 million in strategic funding led by Sound Ventures (January 2026), with Fin Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Forgepoint Capital Partners taking part. The platform has three modules. Observe finds the AI apps, agents and MCP servers in use, drawing on a catalog of thousands of AI applications, and classifies conversations by intent. Control sets policies by department, role, intent or workforce type, routes prompts to approved or cheaper models, limits agents to approved MCP servers and tools, redacts sensitive data in real time and keeps audit trails. Protect (Witness Protect, which WitnessAI calls "the enterprise AI firewall") screens prompts and responses for prompt injection, jailbreaks and harmful output and tokenizes PII, credentials and secrets. Witness Attack runs automated red teaming against models before deployment. WitnessAI says it sees AI activity across the network without browser extensions or endpoint clients, including native apps such as Windows 11 Copilot and Office 365, and it integrates with F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator for encrypted AI traffic. Each customer gets a single-tenant instance with customer-controlled encryption. In January 2026 it launched WitnessAI Agentic Security, which covers coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex and records the user, agent, tool and rule for every blocked tool call. In July 2026 it added AI FinOps features: spend estimates for unsanctioned AI apps and agents, metering of sanctioned token use, an ROI dashboard and cost-based model routing. **AI compliance coverage** The compliance page offers logging of every AI app and interaction, policy enforcement and masking of regulated data, but names no AI framework. WitnessAI's AWS Marketplace listing says its audit trails support compliance reporting for the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF and PCI DSS 4.0.1. We found no control mappings for any of them. WitnessAI announced a SOC 2 Type II attestation in October 2025; it has no public trust center. **Who it's for** Large enterprises that want to see and govern how employees and agents use public and internal AI tools, and to add runtime protection to their own AI apps. WitnessAI says its customers include financial services firms, utilities, airlines, automakers, retailers and telecoms. InComm Payments is the only customer it names on its site.