Governance has emerged as a key issue as enterprises troubleshoot AI systems. Some companies are taking a two-pronged approach. One model handles incoming queries, and a second model prevents the first model from running into problems.
That’s the premise of ZeroDrift, a new AI compliance service that announced a $10 million seed round on Tuesday. (Investors include a16z Speedrun, Reign Ventures, PitchDrive Ventures, U&I Ventures, and more.) The company handles the second part of the system entirely, standing between the AI model and the end user to flag and replace messages that could cause compliance issues.
It may seem strange to build an AI system that corrects the mistakes of other AI systems. However, ZeroDrift’s correction system has several architectural advantages over the model it corrects. This system is triggered by traditional programs that decisively apply known compliance standards such as SOC 2 and GDPR. LLM only occurs when a message is flagged and rewrites a compliant version of the same message.
“We can definitively identify what the regulated areas are, what the violations are, and we have an LLM that can do the rewriting,” Aroomoogan says.
Importantly, the entire system can run with lower latency and higher reliability than traditional LLM. This is the company’s main advantage over large labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which often already exist in the underlying systems.
The most obvious use case is AI chatbots. AI chatbots are already being deployed in front of consumers, and fraudulent answers can have serious consequences. But Almugan sees the overall addressable market as potentially much larger, spanning AI-generated messages that are never seen by humans and are only generated within automated systems. So far, this market is relatively small, but it is one that will grow as AI becomes more widespread.
If the funding is any indication, there’s a lot of pent-up demand for the product. CEO Kmesh Almoughan said, “This was probably the fastest funding I’ve ever raised in my life,” and credited Andressen Horowitz’s help in structuring the seed round. “We signed a contract within three weeks and now we are overbooked by three times the amount.”
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