- ByStartupStory | February 5, 2024
AI-based security startup P0 has secured $6.5 million in its seed funding round from Silicon Valley-based investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Founded by Kunal Agarwal and Prakash Sanker, P0 focuses on eliminating data exploits by securing APIs. The startup aims to position itself as a unified platform for enterprises, offering cataloging, access control, and threat protection across all APIs within their systems.
P0 functions as an assistant for developers, using large language models (LLMs) to identify safety and security concerns in software. Instead of merely checking for issues in the code after it’s completed, the platform works alongside developers as they build the code. It carefully examines the entire code to detect potential problems or vulnerabilities, and tests the code using special inputs created based on the code’s context.
Lightspeed, known for its portfolio companies like OYO, ShareChat, and BYJU’S, has been working in stealth mode with Sanker and Agarwal over the past year. Their focus has been on addressing code and API security challenges using a comprehensive LLM-first approach.
“We have known the founders for a long, long time, and they are at the absolute cutting edge of using LLMs in production to solve this age-old problem,” said Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed India.
Agarwal, a second-time founder with Lightspeed, previously founded Priority Vendor, funded by the venture capital firm in 2016 and later acquired by Softbank-funded C2FO in 2019.
Sanker brings a strong educational foundation in computational sciences and mathematics from Stanford University, complemented by his work experience at Splunk and Palantir. “P0’s cutting-edge approach to code and API security is unique and amongst the first-ever truly LLM-native ways of solving this age-old and ever-evolving problem. We are excited to have incubated and backed them from when this was just an idea on paper,” Mohapatra added.
The funding comes at a time when more Indian founders and startups are turning to AI to address various challenges. Recently, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s third startup, Krutrim, became India’s first AI unicorn with a $50 million funding round led by a group of investors, including Matrix Partners India.
Last month, Bengaluru-based gen AI startup Sarvam AI raised $41 million (approximately INR 342 crore) in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
