Protect AI vs Robust Intelligence

Protect AI was a Seattle AI security company founded in 2022 by Ian Swanson (CEO), Daryan Dehghanpisheh and Badar Ahmed, who had previously worked at AWS, Oracle and DataScience.com. It raised $108.5 million: a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures (December 2022), a $35 million Series A led by Evolution Equity Partners (July 2023) and a $60 million Series B led by Evolution Equity Partners (August 2024), with Salesforce Ventures and Samsung among the investors. GeekWire reported 75 employees and offices in Seattle, Berlin and Bangalore in August 2024. Protect AI bought huntr, Rebuff, Laiyer AI and SydeLabs. Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire Protect AI on April 28, 2025, the same day it launched Prisma AIRS, and completed the deal on July 22, 2025. It did not disclose the price; SiliconANGLE cited GeekWire sources putting it above $500 million. Ian Swanson joined Palo Alto as VP, Product, Prisma AIRS, and Prisma AIRS 2.0 (October 28, 2025) "completes the native integration" of Protect AI. Protect AI is no longer sold separately: protectai.com now redirects to the Prisma AIRS page, although some old blog posts are still online. Buyers should evaluate Prisma AIRS. **What it sold** Protect AI sold AI security, not governance. Guardian, built on its open-source ModelScan tool, scanned machine learning models for unsafe or malicious code and enforced policies on which models could be used. In October 2024 Hugging Face added the Guardian scanner to its Hub, and by April 2025 Protect AI had scanned 4.47 million model versions there. Recon tested AI applications before deployment with a library of 450 simulated attacks, and Layer filtered malicious prompts in production. Its earlier AI Radar product built a machine learning bill of materials. The huntr community, with more than 15,000 members in August 2024, reported AI and ML vulnerabilities. Palo Alto says the deal brought model scanning, posture management, AI red teaming, runtime protection and AI agent security to Prisma AIRS, but it doesn't map each Protect AI product to a Prisma AIRS module. **Open source** LLM Guard, Protect AI's open-source library for scanning prompts and responses, is archived: its README says the project and its Hugging Face models are no longer developed or maintained. **Frameworks** The Protect AI pages still online don't document a mapping to an AI framework, so this profile lists none. Prisma AIRS maps its AI Red Teaming attacks to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and NIST.

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.