• Build Club
  • Posts
  • Build Club Spotlight #3: 🌐 Redactive AI with Alex, Andrew and Lucas

Build Club Spotlight #3: 🌐 Redactive AI with Alex, Andrew and Lucas

Access Control for AI

Author

Daniel Malkinson
May 16, 2024

Welcome to the Build Club Spotlight Series, where we shine a light on some of the most promising Aussie AI startups!

Join us as we dive into Redactive AI with Alex Valente, Andrew Pankevicius and Lucas Sargent, and discover how Redactive AI's innovative platform addresses the critical need for secure AI application development, empowering developers to navigate complex security challenges when implementing AI for enterprise.

Build Club is also running a collaborative build sprint with the Redactive team so stay tuned! ⚡️

Talking Points

Let’s dive in!

What is your background and your story of founding Redactive AI?

The reason we started Redactive was pretty simple: The first thing that we noticed when ChatGPT came out was that many people were copying company data and pasting it into the chat window!

We all have an Enterprise SaaS background and understood that companies would need new security measures to stop their employees from sending company data to ChatGPT.

Developers would need a way to safely handle permissioned enterprise information when implementing generative AI solutions.

Amid the generative AI hype last year, we recognised a gap in the open-source community's approach to AI application development.

While the open-source community was filled with interesting projects that set up proof of concepts of what AI could do, we believed that enterprises would struggle to adopt generative AI without their very specific security needs being fulfilled to get these use cases into production.

The inception of Redactive started with a question:
"What if we turned enterprise security and access needs into a user-friendly developer platform for building AI features that breeze through information security reviews?"

Co-founders of Redactive

How would you describe your product offerings to a new customer and to an AI engineer?

For new customers: Redactive allows LLMs to respond to both the person asking the question and the question being asked. We make sure that LLMs can understand your business and recognise the differing levels of access to information in your business. 

For AI Engineers: Redactive is a developer-first managed RAG pipeline that ingests fine-grained permission information from a variety of B2B SaaS tools.

Redactive sets itself apart as a developer platform that bridges AI applications with permissioned data. Our platform ensures the right user can only access and see the right information across their business when leveraging an AI application. 

This allows us to unlock a new category of AI enabled productivity use cases that can fully leverage permissioned data, of which the rest of the market of developer tooling is failing to unlock for enterprises. To name a few of the use cases we unlock include permissions aware knowledge base search, Human-in-the loop, sensitive data custom service agents, risk reporting bots, to name a few.

How has the journey been so far - how has Redactive AI evolved?

Our journey has been amazingly rewarding and working with great technologists has been fantastic. The business and our product evolution has been rapid and a lot of work!

Key milestones:

  • We tinkered with our concept and built a POC

  • Shared our idea with our network of potential clients, technology resellers and investors to validate our idea where we obtained great feedback and positive signal

  • We raised our preseed to build out the team and product for early enterprise clients

  • Spent time in the US on extensive market validation, in doing so we obtained more investment and partnerships with great global tech companies

  • We signed our first wave of customers and built out our developer focused product

  • We built out a comprehensive sales and marketing function

  • Raised our seed round to scale up our engineering team in Australia, and built a sales function in the US. 

The product is regularly responding to what the technology can do. The biggest milestones in our journey was understanding our vision early on and putting together a plan to achieve our big goals. When we landed our first enterprise customer, it was a big moment for us that our solution we had designed over a number of months had paid off. Definitely a big moment for the team. 

The product will only get better as LLMs capabilities and use cases grow. The biggest milestone.

What advice would you give to aspiring AI builders?

Shoot for problems that are hard and cause pain for customers who are willing to pay. Redactive has a big vision to solve security and permissioning problems that we know are difficult to solve for developers across a wide variety of organisations. 

Find a great team, who deeply understand the problem and create an innovative solution that sets you apart from the current options and future competitors.

Build quickly, ship products and obtain real life customer and partner feedback to iterate your product.

How can our audience help you build and grow Redactive AI?

We want to engage with builders as much as possible. Right now, Redactive is working with numerous enterprises who all want Agents, LLM applications and new AI apps to launch into their environments and solve their problems. We want to work with builders to build on top of Redactive and enable them to deliver extremely impactful applications very quickly. 

We want to get in front of application developers as soon as possible to help them unblock their information security challenges and uplevel their application to not only get to production, but uplevel it with access to real-time, permissions aware data.

That's why we are running our sponsored build sprint alongside Build Club…  stay tuned on Build Club socials!

Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have a use case you want to explore, or if you want to know how Redactive could help your organisation assess if they are ready for Redactive for a meeting to explore needs and capabilities.

Follow Redactive’s Journey:

Liked this post and want to be featured next? Reach out to Daniel Malkinson or [email protected] 

Come build with us, we are an open-source community of 700+ of ANZ’s top AI builders.

Sign up here, get involved in upcoming events here and follow us on Linkedin here.