Why We Invested in Virtue AI: Building the Future of Safe and Secure AI

At Walden Catalyst, we back bold founders solving fundamental challenges at the intersection of deep tech and global impact. Our investment in Virtue AI—part of their $30 million Seed and Series A round, co-led with Lightspeed Venture Partners—is rooted in a strong conviction: as AI becomes increasingly embedded in the fabric of business and society, the need for robust, scalable AI security infrastructure has never been more urgent.

A Critical Gap in the AI Stack

AI is moving fast—faster than most organizations can securely deploy or govern. Traditional cybersecurity solutions aren’t built to address the novel risks introduced by large language models, generative AI, and foundation models. Issues like hallucinations, prompt injections, model leakage, jailbreaks, and data poisoning are not just theoretical—they’re happening in production environments, and the cost of failure is enormous.

Virtue AI is filling this critical gap. Their platform enables companies to red team AI models, train safer systems, and apply real-time guardrails to protect against known and emerging threats. It's not just about finding problems—Virtue AI helps fix them before they cause harm.

A Founding Team That’s World-Class

Virtue AI is led by an extraordinary founding team: Bo Li, Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin, and Sanmi Koyejo—four of the world’s most accomplished AI and security researchers. With deep roots at institutions like UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UIUC, they bring both academic excellence and a sharp product vision that translates advanced research into real-world impact.

Their combined experience and deep technical insight uniquely position them to lead this category and set new standards for AI safety and compliance.

A Platform Approach to AI Security

What impressed us most is Virtue AI’s comprehensive, modular platform:

• VirtueRed enables algorithmic red teaming across hundreds of risk categories—scalable, repeatable, and cost-efficient.

• VirtueGuard delivers industry-leading content moderation and safety enforcement, across modalities and languages.

• VirtueAgent helps enterprises interpret security policies and align AI systems with evolving regulations.

This isn’t just tooling—this is infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure every enterprise deploying AI will need.

Trusted by the Best, Built for What’s Next

Virtue AI is already working with high-impact organizations across finance, healthcare, enterprise software, and research. Companies like Uber and Glean are early adopters, validating both the need and the quality of Virtue’s offerings.

As AI adoption accelerates, Virtue AI is poised to be a foundational layer in the enterprise AI stack—making sure innovation doesn’t come at the cost of safety, privacy, or trust.

Looking Forward

We’re thrilled to support Virtue AI on their journey to secure the AI-powered world. As they scale their team, expand their platform, and deepen their presence across industries, we’re confident they’ll play a central role in shaping a safer, more responsible AI future.

Meet the company: visit virtueai.com.

— The Walden Catalyst Team