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White Circle lands $11M to help companies secure AI systems
TechEU
May 12, 2026 · 3 min listen
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White Circle lands $11M to help companies secure AI systems
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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 âvibe codingâ 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 Circleâs team across the US, the UK, and Europe, and support the continued growth of its global customer base.
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