Redactive AI lands $11.5 million to solve the AI talent gap

Redactive AI, founded by Atlassian alumni, has secured $11.5 million in seed funding for its enterprise-grade AI solutions platform. The round was led by Blackbird Ventures and US-based Felicis Ventures, with additional investments from Atlassian Ventures and automation software company Zapier.

Redactive AI was founded in September 2023 by former Atlassian product managers Andrew Pankevicius and Alexander Valente, along with AI engineer Lucas Sargent.

The platform addresses the lack of AI engineering and security skills within enterprise software teams, enabling software engineers to develop secure generative AI applications that comply with stringent data access, auditing and AI governance requirements.

Bridging the AI enterprise gap…

Redactive AI co-founder Andrew Pankevicius explained the inspiration behind the business, highlighting the suite of experience gained at one of Australia’s most prominent unicorns. According to Pankevicius, this shaped the approach to solving similar challenges in the generative AI space.

“Alex and I used to work on data sovereignty at Atlassian, moving customers’ toolchains from server and data center environments into the new cloud product suite. We learned so much about what enterprise requirements are to actually get a product live,” Pankevicius said on a call with SmartCompany.

The team predicted the generative AI space would need similar requirements, and theorised the need for a platform that bridges the gap between pilot projects and production-ready AI applications.

“There are great open-source projects, but they’re not going to make it into production in enterprise environments,” Pankevicius said.

“So we thought if we went out on our own and built a developer platform that solved those enterprise requirements, made it very easy for software engineers to integrate into — it would actually help with that gap from pilot to production.”

Pankevicius believes Redactive AI’s focus on solving complex enterprise challenges, rather than going from the bottom up, from the outset gives it a competitive edge.

“We’ve gone for a really hard problem from the start. I’m really proud of the fact that Redactive is an organisation that’s aimed at enterprises’ big, hairy challenges and has engaged CIOs and CTOs from day one,” Pankevicius said.

Redactive AI’s platform has already been successfully implemented with several pilot clients, particularly within the financial services sector.

One application has been in the development of conversational AI chatbots, which leverage not only the knowledge of large language models but also uniquely connect to authorised data within organisations.

This ensures that only authorised users can access specific information, thereby maintaining data security and compliance.

Redactive AI has also been utilised to create AI agents for automating report writing, drawing information from various cross-tool sources to save significant time for business analysts.

“Redactive makes generative AI systems aware of what end users actually have access to across their entire business. And that means that those generative AI use cases can pull in a meaningful context to personalise the application ” Pankevicius said.

… and the talent gap

Redactive AI also aims to tackle the significant talent gap in AI engineering within software teams.

“By building our developer platform, we focus on that skill set gap of data engineering and AI engineering,” Pankevicius said.

“Redactive can be your AI engineer, you and your existing team can now perform in this space even though you might not be able to hire directly for it.”

The timing on this is certainly poignant. Earlier this week the Tech Council of Australia released an AI jobs report that predicted 200,000 AI jobs by 2030. However, the report also warned that this would only be achievable if the significant skills shortage in the sector was addressed.

This echoes similar sentiments from Google Australia, which has estimated AI could provide a $280 million boost to the Australian economy by 2030, but only if the technology was effectively adopted.

Redactive AI focuses on data privacy and security

Pankevicius also spoke about how the startup’s platform is designed to meet stringent data security and governance requirements, particularly at a time when AI standards are still evolving.

“We’re operating at a high standard of data security and governance in Australia, which makes us attractive in the US market. We ensure our platform adheres to these standards and addresses any potential ethical concerns by focusing on information security and cyber security,” Pankevicius said.

When it comes to AI ethics, including bias and safety, Redactive AI believes this lives at the large language model level.

“Redactive is agnostic to the underlying model, so you can swap that in and out based on providers or what you believe for your organisation,” Pankevicius said

“What we live out is more of that information security, cyber security level around making sure that — based on access control or identity kind of constructs inside of your organisation, that they are actually proliferated to generate AI systems as well.”

Expanding the platform and the overseas team

With the new funding, Redactive AI plans to expand its team and operations, particularly in the US. At the present time, it has 10 employees but plans to hire up to around 15.

“To compete in this market, you’ve got to hire top talent,” Pankevicius said.

“We have a lot of AI and ML engineers inside of our team. We’re hiring really strongly down within our go-to market and our channel team as well. Partnering with the best consulting firms around the world, is our kind of play into all the super not just in APAC, but also the US as well.”

Based on the feedback it’s received from its clients, Redactive AI wants to become a fully-fledged responsible AI platform.

“That’s where we’re going, and that actually brings in so many more people who are less technical — like change managers — inside of enterprises and actually helping them proliferate AI agents across the full organisation,” Pankevicius said.

“[For that] you need transparency, you need auditability, and those kinds of abilities to actually surface what AI is doing inside of your organisation. And Redactive wants to be there.”

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