🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Credal

✍️ Notes from the Editors

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We had hoped to start this year off—and our first company cover of 2025—on a positive note. However, as two Los Angeles residents, and on behalf of the LA tech scene, this past week has been one of the hardest for our city. For those displaced by the fire, please refer to this list of resources from the LA Times.

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Build secure AI assistants

While AI tools are abundant, many lack context when it comes to a company’s specific needs. Credal addresses this by offering software that helps companies securely integrate AI with their data, while strictly adhering to security, privacy, and permissions. For instance, a salesperson at a company wouldn’t be able to get specific insights about its internal data from ChatGPT. Credal bridges that gap, allowing the company to use whatever AI integrations it needs to have the proper context and infrastructure to provide meaningful insights into company- and role-specific data and information.

A key emphasis for Credal is on security, which is two-fold. On one hand, there is the broader security and compliance of protecting a customer’s data: proprietary company data should not be used as training data for other use. On the other hand, there’s security and permissioning within a company. For example, data meant strictly for sales teams might not be meant to be visible to engineering.

Credal offers three main features. First, it offers Assistant Builder, which allows users to build AI assistants tailored for their specific workflows. Second, it offers a more general Enterprise Chat Portal, which serves as a general chatbot that is integrated with proprietary company data. Third, its Developer RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Platform is the most technical and geared toward developers. Credal’s developer platform enables developers to easily launch RAG applications, which optimize large language models (LLMs), from zero-to-one to support their LLM use cases.

🔗 Check it out: credal.ai

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💰 Business Model

Credal sells to enterprise customers, and the pricing is customized based on specific needs around data sources and integrations.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Launched in 2022

• Participated in the the Winter 2023 YC batch

• Raised $4.8 million in seed round led by Spark Capital in 2023

• Customers include Wise, MongoDB, Lattice, incident.io, and more

📖 Founder Story

Prior to founding Credal, Thambapillai was at Palantir, Google, THG, and GoCardless. At Palantir, he worked on transformer models for the Department of Health & Human Services. During his time there, he met Fischer, who was doing similar work at Palantir for the Department of Defense. In those environments, it is paramount to understand and be compliant with security, government requirements, and problems around data access.

Both of them had spent about eight years at Palantir and, in their last few years there, felt the pain point of difficult security and permissions, especially in a very strict space like the government. They realized the transformer models they were working on were incredibly powerful but oftentimes needed to be supplemented with specific, complex data in a way that was compliant and usable. From there, the idea for Credal was born, and they haven’t looked back.

💼 Opportunities

• Founding GTM - Deployment Strategist

• Founding GTM (Growth & Product Marketing)

• Founding AI Engineer

• Founding Software Engineer, Full-Stack

• Founding Account Executive

• Chief of Staff

🔮 Our Analysis

The two pain points of security/compliance and using internal data for AI have become ubiquitous for companies of all sizes. Credal has zeroed in on a major concern for companies eager to adopt AI tools: how to keep sensitive data secure and accessed by the right hands. While there’s no shortage of AI applications available to enterprises, Credal takes it a step further by giving businesses control over their data and streamlining that integration for better and more company-specific application and insight. In a world where the risk of sharing proprietary information with AI providers is growing, Credal helps companies navigate this with confidence.

Another strength of Credal is the expertise and personnel. As noted earlier, Credal’s founders are not only familiar with the problem, they have years of experience and subject matter knowledge around transformer models, their applications, and their use in security-sensitive spaces. This exhibits both a deep breadth of technical knowledge, but also first-hand experience of the problem and processes they are trying to solve for. The bar for expertise needed to build a viable solution in this space is high, and the team has paired that with an understanding of the problem space, which I believe gives them a big edge. This shows in Credal’s offerings, which are comprehensive and well-defined in their use cases.

Its early momentum is encouraging, and Credal also benefits from having expertise and clarity in a growing market. While AI is the buzzword among startups these days, Credal has a defined focus around the underlying infrastructure to help companies better leverage AI. With the use of AI continuing to grow among companies and the universal need for secure and proper integrations, the value proposition for tools like Credal only continues to grow. It has already demonstrated product-market fit with acquiring some notable customers; next up is to see how it iterates and scales.

📚 Further reading

• Credal aims to connect company data to LLMs ‘securely’ [TechCrunch]

• Credal.ai Raises $4.8 Million in Seed Round [The SaaS News]

• Credal Blog [Credal Website]

Written by Matthew Huo

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Unicorner has been compensated by Glenstar Ventures Inc. for publicizing the offering of its securities. Read the full 17(b) disclosure on our website.

Nothing in this email constitutes investment or legal advice. Readers should conduct their own research before making investment decisions.