HydroX AI

What HydroX AI does

HydroX AI is a Palo Alto-based AI security company founded in 2023 that provides an end-to-end platform for evaluating, monitoring, and protecting large language models deployed by enterprise organizations. The core platform, EPASS, applies proprietary Red Model/Judge Model evaluation architectures across Safety, Privacy, Security, and Integrity domains, covering more than 30 threat categories and 20 jailbreak patterns with sub-100ms detection latency. Adjacent products include the HydroX Firewall (real-time protection for production AI outputs), PII Masker (co-developed with Zilliz for safe RAG), Safe AI (encrypted meeting intelligence), CaptainNote (offline-first meeting assistant), Stay Aware AI (child safety), and the publicly available LLM Safety Leaderboard.

The company monetizes through quote-based annual enterprise subscriptions, professional services for red-teaming and training, and a marketplace SKU distributed via Google Cloud Marketplace. Its go-to-market is sales-led and partner-amplified: founding membership in the AI Alliance alongside IBM and Meta, an LLM red-teaming partnership with Anthropic, a Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator 2025 graduate status, and research collaborations with Carnegie Mellon University and UC San Diego. Target buyers are enterprise security and AI/ML teams in regulated and high-risk sectors such as healthcare, financial services, and legal, supplemented by a consumer education angle via Stay Aware AI.

Funding totals approximately $14 million across three rounds (a $4M angel led by Vitalbridge Capital in November 2023, and two $5M rounds in January and August 2025 with BdsVC leading the latter), while disclosed headcount remains in the 1-10 range with offices in San Jose and Seattle. Revenue is not publicly disclosed and the company remains privately held under HydroX AI Inc., incorporated in Delaware.

Name

HydroX AI

Legal name

HydroX AI Inc.

Website

https://hydrox.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2023

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

HydroX AI is an AI security platform founded in 2023 that provides end-to-end evaluation, real-time monitoring, and customizable risk assessment for large language models, serving enterprise security and AI/ML teams via sales-led subscriptions and the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

AI Security Software

NAICS

Security Systems Services (except Locksmiths) (561621)

SIC

Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)

akta.pro primary industry

Responsible AI, Security & Privacy Platforms (Safety, Guardrails, PII) (HDAEANAG)

akta.pro secondary industries

Prompt Security & Injection Defense (HDAAAKAE), Audit, Explainability & Accountability Tooling (traceability, reporting) (HDAAAKAL)

Keywords

• AI security platform
• LLM safety evaluation
• AI firewall
• Red teaming services
• PII data protection

Headquarters

HQ city

Palo Alto

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices2 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Infrastructure

Revenue model

1. Enterprise Platform Licensing: Annual subscription or usage-based pricing for access to HydroX AI security platform including AI Firewall, evaluation tools, and monitoring capabilities. Platform available via direct access and Google Cloud Marketplace listing.
2. Professional Services & Training: Training courses on AI safety and security for video business compliance. Contact sales for pricing on custom engagements and professional services.
3. Red Teaming & Security Analysis: Adversarial security testing services for customer-facing chatbots including jailbreak resistance testing and security findings reports.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels4 records

Marketing channels7 records

Core offering

HydroX AI provides an end-to-end AI security platform that enforces safety, governance, and compliance across large language models. Its core offering combines real-time AI Firewall protection with sub-100ms threat detection, the EPASS evaluation platform for stress-testing models across Safety, Privacy, Security, and Integrity domains, and supporting tools like PII Masker, CaptainNote, and Stay Aware AI for organizations deploying LLMs at scale.

Product overview

HydroX AI offers a unified platform architecture combining multiple integrated products and modules. The core HydroX AI Platform provides end-to-end AI Security for protecting organizations deploying LLMs. Key modules include AI Safety (real-time threat interception), Security Analysis (adversarial testing), Safe AI (meeting intelligence protection), and AI Evaluation & Testing (red-teaming). Supporting products include PII Masker (integrated with Milvus/Zilliz Cloud for RAG security), EPASS (evaluation platform with leaderboard), CaptainNote (offline meeting assistant), Stay Aware AI (child safety), HydroX Firewall (enterprise firewall), Attack Prompt Tool (Chrome extension), and the LLM Safety Leaderboard. The platform spans the entire AI development and deployment lifecycle from model evaluation to production guardrails.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Stay Aware AI: AI-powered child safety platform that helps families and schools detect digital risks early, understand emotional wellbeing, and guide children with education.
• Safe AI
• CaptainNote
• EPASS
• PII Masker
• HydroX Firewall
• HydroX Firewall

Products and services

• HydroX AI Platform End-to-end AI Security platform that protects organizations by enforcing safety, governance, and compliance across large language models through protection, evaluation, and red-teaming capabilities.
• HydroX Firewall Enterprise-grade firewall preventing jailbreaks and prompt injection attacks with real-time AI threat detection, model protection, and encrypted runtime monitoring. Available on Google Cloud Marketplace.
• EPASS (Evaluation Platform for AI Safety and Security) Comprehensive evaluation platform using Red Model, Judge Model, and Aggregation Pipeline for assessing AI models across 30+ attack method categories including GCG, PAIR, TAP, ArtPrompt, Adaptive, Past Tense, and ReNeLLM attacks.
• PII Masker Advanced PII detection and masking tool using DeBERTa-v3 NLP model that automatically detects and masks personally identifiable information in Gen AI applications, integrated with Milvus and Zilliz Cloud vector databases.
• CaptainNote Secure, offline-first AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings locally using local instances of Ollama and Whisper models for 100% data sovereignty.
• Stay Aware AI AI-powered child safety platform for families and schools detecting digital risks, understanding emotional wellbeing, with real-time AI guidance and critical alerts for bullying, scams, self-harm, and predatory behavior.
• Safe AI Hardened security layer for meeting intelligence preventing data leakage with enterprise-grade encryption, encrypted intelligence governance, real-time data redaction, and permission-based context isolation.
• Attack Prompt Tool Google Chrome Extension for adversarial prompt testing that simplifies jailbreak prompt assessment for AI safety research and security professionals.
• HydroX LLM Safety Leaderboard Independent evaluation platform comparing LLM safety, privacy, integrity, and security across models ranked by overall safety score based on four domains.

Quantifiable outcome

• Sub-100ms real-time threat detection with <50ms latency impact on AI inference
• +2 more outcomes

Named customers4 records

Segments8 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration2 records

AI capability11 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

Eight partnerships are on record, tiered minor and core.

• Carnegie Mellon UniversityminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 21 November 2025Research collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico/INESC-ID to develop RECAP method for extracting memorized content from large language models. Addresses concerns about proprietary data and copyright infringement in AI training.
• Google CloudcoreChannel Partner/ Reseller/ Distributor · 1 July 2025HydroX Firewall available on Google Cloud Marketplace providing enterprises with easy, secure, and scalable deployment options. Also partner through Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator program.
• ROOSTminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 13 March 2025Sponsorship and collaboration with ROOST, a groundbreaking online safety initiative backed by funders including Discord, OpenAI, and Google. Focus on advancing AI trust and safety.
• ZillizcoreTechnology or Integration · 6 November 2024Collaboration to develop PII Masker, an advanced tool for detecting and masking PII in AI applications. Integrated with Milvus and Zilliz Cloud vector databases to enhance data privacy in RAG applications. Uses DeBERTa-v3 NLP model for accurate PII detection with up to 1,024 token support.
• AnthropiccoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 20 October 2024Partnership for LLM red teaming under Anthropic's bug bounty program. HydroX AI stress tests Anthropic's LLMs focusing on identifying and mitigating universal jailbreak attacks in critical high-risk domains including CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) and cybersecurity. Represents collaborative effort to strengthen AI safety guardrails globally.
• IBMcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 8 July 2024Partnership with IBM as a founding member of the AI Alliance for evaluation of GenAI models in high-risk industries including healthcare, financial services, and legal sectors. Focuses on developing benchmarks and toolsets for domain-specific LLM evaluation addressing precision/safety, regulatory compliance, and ethical considerations.
• MetacoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 8 July 2024Partnership with Meta as a founding member of the AI Alliance for evaluation of GenAI models in high-risk industries including healthcare, financial services, and legal sectors. Focuses on developing benchmarks and toolsets for domain-specific LLM evaluation addressing precision/safety, regulatory compliance, and ethical considerations.
• AI AlliancecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 8 July 2024Official member of the AI Alliance, an international community focused on enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible AI innovation. Alliance includes scientific rigor, trust, safety, security, diversity, and economic competitiveness focus areas.

Scale indicators6 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Lakera: Direct competitor providing enterprise LLM security and prompt-injection defense (Gandalf). Comparable product positioning to HydroX Firewall with enterprise sales motion and similar threat-category coverage.
• Calypso AI: AI security and observability platform for generative AI deployments. Competes on real-time guardrails, policy enforcement, and red-teaming for enterprise LLM rollouts.
• Guardrails AI: Open-source and commercial framework for LLM guardrails (NeMo Guardrails lineage). Competes on safety validation and runtime enforcement for generative AI applications.
• HiddenLayer: AI application and model security SaaS with threat detection for LLMs and ML systems. Comparable enterprise GTM and overlapping threat-category taxonomy.
• Protect AI: AI security platform covering model scanning, supply-chain security, and LLM red-teaming. Direct overlap with EPASS evaluation and HydroX security analysis offerings.

Broad incumbents

• AWS Bedrock Guardrails: Native guardrails service for models on AWS Bedrock. Bundles safety controls with foundation-model access, creating a distribution threat to standalone AI security vendors.
• Robust Intelligence (Cisco AI Defense): AI firewall and model risk management platform acquired by Cisco. Competes head-to-head with HydroX Firewall and EPASS for enterprise AI guardrails, now backed by Cisco's enterprise distribution.
• Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety: Native hyperscaler offering for prompt-injection, jailbreak, and harmful-content detection. Represents a competitive substitute for HydroX Firewall on the Microsoft stack.
• Cisco AI Defense: Cisco's enterprise AI security portfolio built on the Robust Intelligence acquisition. Overlaps with HydroX Firewall and EPASS across model evaluation, guardrails, and runtime protection.

Emerging players

• WhyLabs: AI observability and security platform with LLM guardrails and monitoring. Comparable in addressing production-time AI threat detection for enterprise data teams.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/HydroX_AI
• GitHubgithub.com/HydroXai
• YouTubeopen.spotify.com/show/2Ki1hmozf0sEQ3PkJvxqpR
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/hydrox-ai

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles8 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds3 records

Investors3 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about HydroX AI