Sunnyvale-based Brevian seeks to simplify the process of creating custom AI agents for business users. With a focus on support teams and security analysts, Brevian aims to expand into other areas over time. Today, the company emerges from stealth mode and announces a successful $9 million seed funding round.
Co-founded by Vinay Wagh (CEO) and Ram Swaminathan (CTO), Brevian, also known as BREV/ΛN, brings together diverse backgrounds from the startup world. Wagh previously held roles as a product director at Databricks and head of products at Bracket Computing. During his time at Databricks, he helped launch the company’s serverless product, Databricks SQL Serverless. “Seeing the potential in products like ChatGPT, I immediately recognized how this could translate into the enterprise space,” Wagh explains. “But I knew that certain key elements were missing for it to be successful. That’s when I connected with Ram through a mutual friend.”
Swaminathan approached Brevian from a different angle, with a background in computer science and machine learning. After years in academia and Bell Labs and HP Labs, he joined LinkedIn, where he led the AI trust team. In late 2022, he joined Wagh in starting Brevian as CTO. “My previous experience was mostly theoretical, so I was eager to see if I could make a real impact in building a product,” Swaminathan shares. “Working with talented individuals in engineering and product development to create something valuable to society was a perfect fit for me.”
The team at Brevian emphasizes the importance of security in all enterprise applications of generative AI. It’s crucial for AI vendors to ensure the protection of sensitive information. Since the launch of Brevian, many companies have barred the use of ChatGPT due to the risk of confidential data being shared through the chat prompts.
In its early stages, Brevian primarily focused on security. “We quickly realized the growing threat of prompt injection attacks and developed a model to detect and prevent them,” Wagh explains. “We collected and monitored various prompts that could cause data leaks and successfully detected and resolved all of them.”
Interestingly, Wagh notes, even today enterprises express serious concerns about security when it comes to large language models, but they struggle to articulate specific worries beyond data leaks. The team quickly learned that the real issue hindering enterprise adoption of AI was not security but the challenge of creating systems that genuinely addressed their needs.
“Our vision is to empower business users in the enterprise to easily incorporate AI into their daily tasks,” Wagh says. “This includes expanding beyond security and developing AI agents to solve a range of problems.”
Brevian’s seed round was led by Felicis partner Jake Storm, who considers AI infrastructure to have taken center stage in 2023. He believes that 2024 will be the year of AI applications and that Brevian is well-positioned for success in this market. “They are ahead of the curve, and we wanted to be a part of it,” Storm says.
With this successful funding round, Brevian plans to accelerate product development and expand its team to meet the growing demand from customers participating in its early release program.
