Big Four firm KPMG announced the spin-out of Cranium, an artificial intelligence (AI) security software firm focused on helping clients protect their AI systems and adhere to government regulations.
Cranium was nurtured and developed in KPMG Studio, which specializes in incubating and accelerating early-stage ventures into high-growth businesses, and is KPMG Studio’s first startup to be spun out on its own. The studio boasts a portfolio of ventures spanning HR, people technology, generative AI, cybersecurity, the metaverse, and Web3. KPMG and cybersecurity investor SYN Ventures have provided seed funding and taken minority stakes in the company.
“Awareness and adoption of AI solutions across the enterprise is at a fever pitch with generative AI models showcasing the ‘magic’ of AI to the general public. In tandem with this acceleration, major regulatory bodies are moving swiftly to set guidelines for organizations deploying AI systems,” said Jonathan Dambrot, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Cranium and a former KPMG Partner. “The inherent nature of AI models learning from new inputs creates a unique set of attack methods that require novel security techniques to account for these threats. Cranium brings visibility, trust, and a new level of security to cybersecurity and data science teams when it comes to the entire AI ecosystem of any organization.”
The increasingly widespread adoption and use of artificial intelligence has garnered increasing attention in recent months, with popular technologies such as ChatGPT and Midjourney being leveraged for a growing range of use cases and raising concerns among employers, teachers, and artists. Regulators are scrambling to meet a growing need to set up rules to govern companies developing and deploying AI systems, and security is becoming a growing concern for companies looking to integrate AI into their operations.
Cranium provides an end-to-end AI security platform that validates security, maps AI pipelines, and monitors for adversarial threats, integrating into existing systems without interruption, according to a KPMG press release. The tool and cloud-agnostic platform works with current toolsets to monitor the entire AI and ML infrastructure, delivering security and trust to the AI environment without interrupting the way organizations work to train, test, and deploy their AI models.
Though Cranium is the first startup to successfully spin out of KPMG’s Studio incubator, given the firm’s heavy investment in innovation and worldwide centers of excellence, it is likely to be first in a long line of disruptors wielding cutting-edge technology.
