Privacy-focused AI firm DynamoFL raises $15 million from Nexus, Canapi Ventures

Privacy-solutions provider for generative AI space, DynamoFL, has raised $15.1 million as a part of a fresh funding round, co-led by existing investor Nexus Venture Partners and Canapi Ventures.

The company said it will use the fresh raise to double down on its team strength, while bolstering its engineering capabilities across the machine learning domain, and strengthening its devops function.

With the current infusion, DynamoFL has raised $19.3 million till date.

Founded in 2021, DynamoFL is an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure platform that helps large-scale enterprises to identify vulnerabilities and fine-tune their large language models (LLMs).

“With the funding, we are going to double the team size. Now we already have like 18 people and we are heading to around 30-35 people by the end of the year. We are going to hire machine learning engineers, scientists, quality backend engineers, architects, and Devops kinds of roles,” Vaikkunth Mugunthan, cofounder and chief executive of DynamoFL, told ET.

With the advent of generative AI, enterprises are largely worried that language models will memorise key sensitive company information, making them vulnerable to data extraction attacks. DynamoFL’s suite allows enterprises to address these vulnerabilities, and fine-tune these language models.

“We are finding vulnerabilities that large generative models have with respect to privacy and we provide organisations and companies with solutions to train these models (keeping sensitive data safe),” Mugunthan said.

Prior to this, the San Francisco-based startup has raised $4.2 million led by Nexus Venture Partners.

Almost 30% -35% of its team strength is based in India.

The last two letters of DynamoFL stand for ‘federated learning’, meaning the platform’s infrastructure suite can be deployed locally and can fine-tune language models where the data is present.

At present, the startup is working with six large enterprises, some of which are Fortune100 companies in the insurance, finance and automotive space.

It currently has a pipeline of another 7-8 clients that it looks to onboard over the coming months. Around 60% of its clientele is based in the North America market, with the rest being split between Europe and Asia Pacific.

The platform charges a flat licence fee and incrementally charges the enterprise based on the number of projects its solutions is being used for.

“While AI holds tremendous potential to transform every industry, the need of the hour is to ensure that AI is safe and trustworthy. DynamoFL is set to do just that and enable enterprises to adopt AI while preserving privacy and remaining regulation-compliant,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners, in a statement.

The recently-passed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 is a big advantage for the firm as it helps them to enter the Indian market much faster, Mugunthan added.

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