The NGIA is in charge of all of the data that the US gets from satellites. There so much data that it would take 2 million analysts to go through it all, according to Serebryany, so it is a ready-made application for AI.
A child prodigy, Serebryany had started taking college courses at UCLA when he was 13, where at 14 he met the founder of Lightspeed venture capital and UCLA alum, Barry Eggers, as well as other VCs. “I basically went to them and said, ‘Hey, I want to start a company focused on AI security. What do you think about backing it?’ They said, ‘Yes,’ and we raised our seed round. And we got going on this mission to secure AI,” says Serebryany.
After a couple of months of assembling all of the pieces together to form the company and build the platform, the fledgling company set out to sell its platform. The company was early to the AI security market, as AI itself was not yet widely adopted. “I had made two mistakes: mistake number one was I had assumed that the rate of progress that all of my friends had been on in Silicon Valley was indicative of the broader kind of American context.
According to Serebryany, CalypsoAI is the largest company in the AI security space based on revenue. With some 40 employees, the company has widened its customer base to include companies in the financial, technology and pharmaceutical industries. The company has raised nearly $40 million in venture funds to date.