Palo Alto · AI Security · Est. 2023
WALD.AI
Secure conversations, any AI assistant. The company teaching enterprises how to say yes to AI.
$4MSeed · 2024
55+Enterprises
4Models, 1 door
Secure conversations, any AI assistant. The company teaching enterprises how to say yes to AI.
It happens a few thousand times a day, across every industry that swore it would never let AI near the good stuff.
Somewhere in a regulated enterprise right now, an analyst is on deadline. She has a spreadsheet full of account numbers and a chatbot that can summarize it in nine seconds. The compliance handbook says one thing. The deadline says another. The deadline usually wins. That quiet collision - between the productivity of generative AI and the fine print of confidentiality - is the exact spot where Wald.ai has planted its flag. The company doesn't try to talk the analyst out of using AI. It assumes she already is, and builds for that reality.
Wald.ai calls itself a context intelligence company, which is a modest way of describing an unfashionable ambition: to make enterprise AI both useful and safe at the same time, without asking anyone to choose. Most security tools pick a side. They block the tool, and the tool gets used anyway through the back door. Wald picked the harder path - keep the door open, but station a very smart guard at it.
Wald.ai empowers users to leverage Generative AI responsibly while protecting against the risk of data leaks.— Wald.ai, on the whole point
Old-school data loss prevention works like a bouncer who only checks IDs by counting the digits. Nine numbers in a row? Must be a social security number. It catches the obvious and misses the meaning - and drowns everyone in false alarms along the way. Wald.ai's bet is that context, not pattern, is what matters. Its engine runs specialized small language models that read a sentence the way a cautious colleague would, understanding that "the Henderson account is underwater" is confidential even though it contains no digits at all.
The trick that makes people lean in: Wald redacts sensitive data on the way to the model, replaces it with intelligent placeholders, and then stitches the real values back into the answer that comes home. The AI does its job. The AI never sees the secret. The user barely notices the guard was ever there.
On-device observation, enforcement and coaching for generative AI usage. Real-time detection and smart redaction with low false-positive rates - so security teams get visibility into shadow AI without slamming the door on it.
One subscription, secure access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok through a single interface. Enterprise DLP, zero data retention and end-to-end encryption baked in. No vendor lock-in, no prompt-window roulette.
An employee writes a prompt containing real customer, patient or financial data.
→Context-aware small language models flag what's sensitive by meaning, not just format.
→Secrets become smart placeholders. The model gets a clean, useful, leak-free prompt.
→The real values are stitched back into the answer. You get the result, not the risk.
Over a decade at Google leading product across Maps and Enterprise, then Chief Digital Officer at Fortune 150 firm JLL. Earlier, shipped security products at CheckPoint and Webroot. A Forbes Technology Council member who has spent a career at the seam of scale and safety.
Engineering leadership pedigree spanning tech titans, with deep expertise in generative AI, cryptography and distributed systems - the exact three disciplines you'd want in a room if your job is to hide data from a model and still get a good answer back.
The wider bench is drawn from Google, Amazon, Adobe and PayPal, and the board reads like a security who's-who: Manu Rekhi of Inventus, Karen Roter Davis of Entrada Ventures, and Adobe CISO Aanchal Gupta as advisor.
In December 2024 Wald.ai closed a $4 million seed round led by Inventus Capital Partners and Entrada Ventures, with MFV Partners and a notable roster of angels - executives from Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and HackerOne. When the people who built the security industry put personal money into an AI-security startup, it says something about where they think the next set of leaks is coming from.
The point was never to block AI. The point is to make it safe enough that nobody has to.— The Wald thesis, paraphrased
Small language models judge sensitivity by context, cutting the false alarms that make old DLP unusable.
Secrets are swapped for placeholders before the prompt leaves, then re-inserted in the reply.
Built for HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA and FERPA - the alphabet soup regulated buyers actually live inside.
Switch between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok from one dashboard, one policy, one bill.
End-to-end encrypted. Your prompts never train anyone else's model - not even Wald's.
Gives security teams visibility into AI already in use, instead of pretending it isn't happening.
Vinay Goel and Ritesh Ahuja start Wald, Inc. to make enterprise AI usable without the leaks.
Contextual Data Loss Protection for AI platforms ships; seed round closes, led by Inventus and Entrada Ventures.
Regulated organizations across banking, healthcare, insurance, legal and education adopt the platform.
Back to the deadline. The same analyst, the same spreadsheet full of account numbers, the same nine-second temptation. Except this time the numbers never leave the building. Wald reads the prompt, quietly swaps the sensitive parts for placeholders, sends the model a version that's useful but harmless, and hands her back an answer that reads as if nothing was ever hidden. The deadline still wins. Compliance wins too. For once, they're on the same side.
That's the small, unglamorous victory Wald.ai is built to repeat a few thousand times a day. Not a moratorium on AI, not a lecture about risk - just a guard smart enough to let the good stuff through and hold the secrets back. The chatbot got its summary. The client's data stayed home. Nobody had to choose. Which, if you've ever sat between a deadline and a handbook, is the rarest outcome of all.