White Circle, the enterprise AI governance company helping
organisations monitor, protect and improve AI systems in real time, has raised
$11 million in seed funding from a group of prominent AI and technology
leaders. Investors include Romain Huet (OpenAI), Dirk Kingma (Anthropic,
formerly OpenAI), Guillaume Lample (Mistral), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face),
Olivier Pomel (Datadog), François Chollet (Keras), Mehdi Ghissassi (formerly
DeepMind), Paige Bailey (DeepMind), and David Cramer (Sentry).
As AI adoption accelerates, companies are facing increasing
challenges around model reliability, safety and governance. The rise of “vibe
coding” and low-barrier AI development has made it easier to launch AI-powered
products quickly, often without full visibility into how those systems behave
once deployed.
White Circle helps companies test, protect, observe and
optimise AI systems through a single API. Its proprietary models monitor AI
inputs and outputs in real time to detect harmful content, hallucinations, prompt-injection attacks, model drift, and malicious users. The platform also
provides analytics tools to help teams evaluate and improve model performance
over time.
In practice, White Circle can identify issues such as
sensitive data leakage, attempts to manipulate AI agents into harmful actions,
or signs of declining model performance. Teams can create custom policies and
automate enforcement actions, including rate limiting or banning abusive users,
while the system continuously improves through labelled user feedback.
Denis Shilov, founder and CEO of White Circle, said the
rapid pace of AI development is outstripping existing governance frameworks.
Companies are increasingly relying on AI systems in areas
that directly impact people, from healthcare and finance to hiring and
security. At the same time, AI development has become significantly more
accessible, making oversight more difficult. White Circle was built to give organisations visibility
into how their AI behaves, help them respond when things go wrong, and provide
a unified system for improving reliability, safety and compliance.
Elena Iumagulova, Head of Design at White Circle, added
that the company designed the product to make AI oversight more accessible for
both technical and non-technical teams, giving organisations a centralised way
to monitor performance, identify risks and optimise models through a single
interface and API, regardless of deployment scale.
The new funding will be used to accelerate product
development, expand White Circle’s team across the US, the UK, and Europe, and
support the continued growth of its global customer base.