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Silicon Valley-based Operant AI, the world's only Runtime AI Application Defense Platform, is launching its presence in India, bringing a critical layer of security to India's rapidly developing AI sector and the industries that engage with it, in order to fuel faster and safer AI innovation.
Operant's unique cybersecurity technology offers complete 3D Runtime Defense for Cloud and AI, actively detecting and blocking the most common and costly attacks facing modern AI systems, including prompt injection, rogue agents, data poisoning, and data exfiltration.
As AI adoption surges across key industries in India—including fintech, healthcare, and enterprise software—the need for robust security measures has become a priority. A recent Deloitte study found that 92% of Indian executives identify cybersecurity threats, including hacking and AI-specific vulnerabilities, as a key concern, while 91% worry about privacy risks tied to sensitive data in AI systems.
In the age of AI, traditional security tools, such as static code scanning and firewalls, are insufficient against AI-powered threats, where malicious prompts, data poisoning, and unauthorized API access can expose businesses to large-scale breaches. Therefore, new security approaches that block attacks in real time are required to protect both AI systems and the cloud environments that are connected to them, where critical data lives unprotected from rogue agents and malicious prompts. Operant's real-time attack detection and prevention capabilities address this gap, ensuring AI-driven enterprises remain secure without slowing down innovation.
Commenting on the need for such a solution, Operant's CEO and co-founder, Vrajesh Bhavsar said, "Today, as AI adoption accelerates, ensuring critical security is more urgent than ever—not just to protect businesses, but also to safeguard their customers and end users from cyber threats and data breaches. At Operant, we've built a solution that does more than detect threats—it actively protects sensitive data such as citizenship IDs, bank account numbers, and API keys in real time. Our platform can identify and auto-redact
private data before it ever leaves a company's environment, ensuring robust data privacy while allowing organizations to scale their AI initiatives confidently and securely."
With AI-driven applications growing rapidly, privacy and security concerns have become key obstacles to deploying AI models at scale. Several of the world's largest payment processing platforms are working on AI-powered fraud detection, yet privacy concerns about how AI data cycles with third parties—such as AI APIs and containerized models—have slowed progress.
Operant's unique in-line auto-redaction capabilities solve this problem by automatically redacting private data before it ever leaves a company's environment. This ensures that companies operating in privacy-conscious industries, such as BFSI and fintech, can leverage AI without compromising data security or regulatory compliance.
"So much of today's AI is deployed on Kubernetes, and it's really important to have a security plan in place to protect these applications and the data they're using," said Sarah Novotny, an AI industry leader who served on the founding team of Kubernetes at Google and is currently on the board of the Coalition for Secure AI (CosAI). “Operant's in-line auto-redaction enables teams to develop AI faster with Kubernetes-native privacy controls that span all the way from infrastructure to AI APIs, ensuring security, platform, and development teams can work together seamlessly to build today's leading AI technologies.”
While most "runtime" cybersecurity solutions only provide noisy visibility into a firehose of unactionable signals, Operant's unique ability to prioritize, detect and block these modern attacks at runtime wherever they happen in the live application environment is pivotal to securing every cloud stack that has any connection to AI, whether that's AI APIs, containerized models, or 3rd party containers using AI for tasks like data analysis.
Operant's India launch represents a homecoming of sorts for its founders after years of innovation at the forefront of the Silicon Valley tech world. Operant's founding team came together in 2021 in San Francisco, California, to solve the biggest problems facing modern software. The company raised its seed funding and launched out of stealth in April 2023, and announced their Series A funding round in September 2024, bringing the total raised to $13.5 million, led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Felicis and Washington DC based venture capital firm Sinewave.
When they started their founder journey, the urgency of securing AI as a freshly critical and rapidly evolving attack surface wasn't new to co-founders Vrajesh Bhavsar, CEO, and Dr. Priyanka Tembey, CTO. Vrajesh and Priyanka had already worked together over a decade ago using Machine Learning and AI to bring new levels of security to the Android ecosystem, back when the rapid adoption of the Android operating system created new opportunities for attackers to infiltrate devices and steal critical data.
