Saint John Startup Wants To Protect Companies From AI Hackers
SAINT JOHN — A new startup out of Saint John has raised over $750,000 in preseed funding to protect businesses using AI from security threats.
James Stewart and Stephen Goddard are the co-founders of TrojAI, a software company that’s developing solutions to protect artificial intelligence platforms from adversarial attacks on training data and AI (artificial intelligence) models.
The company got its start last year while Stewart was working as a vice-president for Patriot One Technologies, which acquired his previous company AI tech company, EhEye, back in November 2018. Goddard, Stewart’s long-time friend and former EhEye board member, was eager for them to start their next entrepreneurial venture in the AI space.
“Of course I wanted to do it again, once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur,” says Stewart, who’s TrojAI’s CEO.
After years of working in the AI space, Stewart and Goddard noticed an issue nobody seemed to address yet.
“One of the problems that has emerged with artificial intelligence is that it’s hackable,” says Stewart. “Cybersecurity, public safety, that was in our DNA. We wanted to do meaningful work and build high-tech jobs around meaningful work, so that’s why I jumped off the cliff again and started this new venture.”
TrojAI’s software helps companies secure data and identify, track and reduce risks on their AI platforms and products.
“We started drawing the comparison between how the innovation came out on the World Wide Web in the early ’90s that sat on infrastructure that was never really built with security in mind,” says Stewart. “That’s exactly what we’re seeing with AI. We’re seeing tremendous innovation. Companies are rushing to deliver on that innovation and cybersecurity tends to be a secondary thought.”
As a practical example, say a hacker was able to access an autonomous vehicle’s data. The hacker could use a trojan or another sort of attack to exploit the vehicle’s training processes. By doing that, they could have the ability to make the self-driving car to get confused and do things like speed up instead of slowing down, etc.
The reasons for these kinds of attacks vary. In the case of autonomous vehicles, it could be for a competitive advantage. But depending on the sector, hacking attacks can be for military advantage, financial fraud, or just to cause trouble.
Goddard says TrojAI’s target customers could be in sectors like defence, medical technology, autonomous vehicles and financial technology.
“We’re at the very early stage of trying to determine who best we should be working with,” says Goddard, who’s the companies chief operating officer.
“I think the stats are now that if you look at Fortune 500 companies, there are claims that as many as three-quarters of them either have an active artificial intelligence platform in their business procedures or production or are planning to do so in the coming year. With that sort of exposure, the market is pretty significant for us.”
TrojAI finished developing its proof of concept last year and over the last quarter has been building out its software platforms. This month, it will be working with its first early adopters. The companies are in the conservation, security, and medical spaces.
“In the next four to 12 weeks we’d like to have at least five … early adopters, and while we’re doing that we’re continuing to iterate the products,” says Goddard. “Based on their feedback, we hope to have what will be a market-ready beta product by the end of our second quarter and we’ll actually be looking for revenue clients starting in the third quarter of this year.”
Troj.Ai has a full-time team of eight people, the majority of them in New Brunswick with a few working out of Montreal. The plan is to hire more people later in the year as the company grows.
“As we look back in particular with what James did with EhEye, where we built that team in New Brunswick, we still want to have our core team here. There are still some advantages over the longer term of having your core team close at hand to work out some issue,” says Goddard. “We would like to see it built here, but we do have the advantage of being able to work remotely.”
The company has raised a pre-seed $750,000 with Techstars, NBIF and Halifax-based Concrete Ventures and a group of angel investors as backers.
“On the east coast, companies have to be much more capital efficient,” says Stewart. “It’s a different environment and we were able to raise a significant pre-seed round that speaks to the vision of the product and the identification of the problem.”
The company also secured just over $200,000 in other funding and financing.
“Combined we have close to a million-dollar funded runway that will take us through much of this year,” says Goddard. “We’re looking at hitting those revenue targets and depending on the work we do here over the first couple of quarters, we may go out and do a much larger seed round before this year is out so we can really scale the business going into 2022.”
With 2020 a tough year for businesses of all kinds, both Stewart and Goddard realize that being able to launch one, and then raise such a large amount of money for it is no small feat.
“We consider ourselves pretty fortunate in a startup in this space and in this current environment to be able to launch a company in 2020, get it funded, and started building a team and a product,” says Goddard. “We think we’re pretty lucky right now.”