🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Kindo

✍️ Notes from the Editors

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AI and security don’t often go hand-in-hand in the minds of corporate executives, and as such, AI tools are often limited in the workplace. Kindo understands that companies prioritize data, and is building a solution to enable AI access while keeping IT teams happy.

We’re excited to include a behind-the-scenes Q&A with Kindo Co-Founder and CTO Bryan Pann. Many thanks to Bryan and the team for taking the time to speak with our contributor Arjun Raj Loomba—you can connect with Arjun on X and LinkedIn.

- Arek and Ethan 🦄

Secure Enterprise AI adoption

Kindo provides a secure solution to manage AI workflows across the workforce. It provides enterprise-level security, options to deploy data and models on premise or on the cloud, and full control of AI-powered business processes. Kindo provides tools like “AI search” to help users contextually search through business applications such as Slack and Google Drive. Users may also access hundreds of AI agents that can do anything from creating a sales pitch to identifying a target audience, with the peace of mind that their data is secure.

🔗 Check it out: kindo.ai

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💰 Business Model

The company uses a SaaS model with a top-down sales approach starting with the CSO. Sales efforts begin with high-level security executives who influence the adoption of the product across the rest of the organization. Kindo helps identify a pilot department or team to start adopting its AI management service and go from there, but has typically found early adoption among IT departments. 

Kindo is open to testing out its product suite before integrating into the rest of the company. It offers a free plan where any user can try out its chat product, which is part of the AI platform. It also offers an enterprise plan with security controls and access to the chat product, dev copilot product, AI agent builder, and more.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised $20.6 million Series A from Sunset Ventures, RRE Ventures, Riot Ventures, New Era Ventures, Marlinspike Capital, Eniac Ventures, and Drive Capital

• Raised $7 million Seed funding in 2023 from Riot Ventures, Flexcap, David Politis, and Andrew Peterson, among others

• Kindo will be at DEF CON 31, the largest cybersecurity conference in the U.S., hosted in Las Vegas on Aug. 10

👫 Founders

• Ron Williams, CEO: Previously Chief Security Officer & Head of IT @ Bird, Chief Security & Chief Privacy Officer & Head of IT @ Clover Health, VP Security and Infrastructure @ Riot Games

• Bryan Vann, CTO: Previously Senior Director of Engineering (Drive) @ Google, CS MS & BS @ UCLA

• Tony Wong, SVP of Enterprise & Operations. Previously VP of Product @ Upside.gg, Agile Organizational Designer @ NFL, Agile Product Manager @ Toyota

💼 Opportunities

• Software Engineer

• Senior Software Engineer

• ML Architect/Applied AI Researcher

• Lead Product Designer

• Executive Admin

🔮 Our Analysis

It never struck me that the Gen AI tools that have helped me so much with school carry so many security implications in enterprise. As a software engineering intern at a large tech company, I don’t have access to dev copilots that I normally would, due to security constraints like data privacy and breaches. There’s a large market need for Kindo’s tools among enterprises, with its SaaS integrations that can help increase employee productivity. 

Kindo has built its product in such a way that CSOs are happy with the level of control they get over tools used at their companies, and end users such as developers can reap the benefits of AI. Its custom AI tools that Kindo CTO Bryan Vann describes in the Founder Q&A are industry agnostic and can become valuable as the company continues to grow quickly. Its flexible deployment options and tailored solutions give Kindo a real competitive advantage. When Meta released its Llama 3.1 model last week, Kindo took a mere 19 hours to release the solution on its platform—it’s moving fast to give customers the best tools out there.

In the future, Kindo may face challenges from large organizations. For example, with OpenAI’s recent announcement of SearchGPT, OpenAI might be eager to expand into this market too. However, it’s unlikely that CSOs trust OpenAI with sensitive data, therefore custom solutions and trust in Kindo might give the company an advantage. Additionally, competitors like Glean have established a presence in the industry. However, Kindo’s focus on security combined with its robust product offerings positions them well to secure a strong market presence.

📚 Further reading

• Kindo aims to take the security stress out of AI workflows [TechCrunch]

• Kindo raises $20.6M to bring security to enterprise AI [VentureBeat]

Written by Arjun Raj Loomba

🎙️ Founder Q&A 

This Q&A has been reconstructed from interview notes.

U: How can startup founders and users find utility in Kindo’s products?

Bryan: Different aspects of our product speak to different people. To the CSOs and the large organizations, it’s about the security controls, and that’s the primary thrust of the company. The end users provide a lot of utility in the product. With a single dropdown, you can change which model you’re using, and use tools like RAG over your company data. The biggest value add from the end user perspective is the agent builder. People build some pretty cool stuff; for example, I have an agent that will help me fill out a security questionnaire. All I need to do is upload a spreadsheet with some questions, and it’ll give me another one with all these questions answered. There’s a private equity firm that built a report evaluator, which helps them with their workflows.

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