Melbourne-headquartered startup Redactive aims to give the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities of large enterprises a leg-up following its latest $11.5 million seed round, after already securing two major Australian clients - a super fund and a financial exchange - in its first eight months of operation.
The founders of Redactive envisage their software becoming an AI engineer for enterprise teams, bridging gaps between skillsets, data access and security so that GenAI use cases can be rolled out responsibly.
Andrew Pankevicius, who co-founded the business in September 2023 with fellow ex-Atlassian product manager Alexander Valente and real-life AI engineer Lucas Sargent, says the platform solves for the most complex problems with AI that traditional software engineers are struggling to navigate.
Amid the generative AI boom last year, the team recognised a gap in the market’s approach to AI application development. Whether it be for AI agents, conversational AI or application pre-processing, developers were encountering a common barrier when it came to allowing large language models (LLM) to perform live permissioned data access.
"We saw first-hand how enterprises with fragmented data repositories and complex security controls would struggle to adopt bespoke generative AI agents and applications without their very specific, dynamic security needs being fulfilled to get these use cases into production," says Pankevicius.
"Redactive started with a question: What if we considered the information security, privacy and permissioned access control needs of an enterprise first, and reversed that out into a simple to adopt developer platform for software engineers to build custom AI-enabled features or products that can seamlessly get through information security reviews and truly make their way into production quickly?"
From that question the exploration continued and the company was able to lock in contracts as the responsible AI platform of choice for two large financial services companies, deploying use cases to more than 500 employees each.
"The more people used these experiences, the more we saw executive teams see Redactive make us a strategic part of their responsible AI strategy," he says.
"We decided to lean into these needs and formed a vision to help organisations deliver AI responsibly."
This gave the founders the impetus to expand their offering to new groups, such as security teams that need to understand whether the data permissions built into their services have any gaps, and leaders and managers who needed a place to manage their organisations' adoption of LLMs and their safety obligations.
"These are human centric problems that require AI agents and employees working together, with the interests of employees as the priority," Pankevicius adds.
"These are hard problems to solve but we have deep customer buy in to fix. We have already begun to chart our vision of how to support these customers."
The company now offers a single API (application programming interface) to handle data syncing, document chunking, embedding models, vector stores, and the live permissioned fetching of business data that end users can use to make real-time business decisions, rather than relying on batched data that is out of date quickly.
The progress to date caught the attention of several Australian and international venture capital (VC) funds with Sydney-based Blackbird and Felicis co-leading the seed round.
The latter is no stranger to Australian startups, having participated in Series A through to F for Canva, with other Australian businesses in its portfolio including Dovetail and Culture Amp - both incidentally in Blackbird's as well.
"When we met Andrew and Alex, we were immediately impressed with their vision to make AI real for enterprises with a critical focus on security and permissions," says Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis.
"We see significant market pull from large enterprise customers, especially banks, insurance companies, and other companies in regulated industries, to build their AI strategy in a secure way.
"We also loved the Atlassian DNA of the team, commercial instincts, and distribution relationships with Zapier and other partners so early in Redactive's life stage."
Blackbird was the leading backer in the round with a stake that is almost as much as the shareholding of each individual founder, while other investors include Atlassian Ventures and Bond Capital, and automation unicorn Zapier with a much smaller holding.
"With Zapier AI bots, users told us it was critical to control real time access to their data," says Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop.
"This is hard at scale as third-party data sources all do permissions differently. Redactive has a super unique approach that avoids having to build expensive and slow permission syncs."
Redactive will use its seed funding to rapidly grow the team across engineering, customer success, and marketing and work directly with enterprises on their Generative AI initiatives. The team, currently comprising 10 people, also looks to expand its footprint and begin hiring in the US.
“We’ve been impressed with the speed Redactive has been able to move at to solve critical challenges for AI native application developers and compliant enterprises” says Blackbird Ventures general partner Michael Tolo.
"It’s a testament to the deep expertise and thoughtfulness the founding team has to tackle the hidden security and governance challenges software teams get stuck on to be able to truly deliver production grade, secure Gen AI applications."
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