Protecto

Protecto is a San Jose-based startup, with an engineering center in Bengaluru, focused on a problem that got much bigger with the enterprise AI rollout: keeping sensitive data safe as it flows into training pipelines, RAG systems, fine-tuning jobs, and LLM prompts. Founded in 2021, the company offers APIs for data discovery, classification, de-identification, and tokenization purpose-built for the AI lifecycle, rather than adapting a legacy DLP or data-masking product built for static databases.

The company got early validation from angel investment by Google and Microsoft executives in 2021, followed by a $4M seed round in 2023 led by Together Fund with participation from Better Capital, FortyTwo VC, Arali Ventures, and Speciale Invest, bringing total funding to $5M. That’s a modest but credible seed-stage raise, consistent with a company that’s a few years into building product-market fit rather than one that has proven itself at scale.

For CISOs and privacy teams grappling with shadow AI usage and unclear data lineage into LLM tools, Protecto addresses a genuinely current problem: most legacy DLP tools weren’t built to understand prompt injection surfaces, embeddings, or RAG retrieval paths. The tradeoff is that it’s an early-stage company without the multi-year track record or large enterprise reference base of established data-protection vendors, so technical evaluation and pilot testing matter more here than they would with a mature category leader.