HydroX AI

HydroX AI, founded in 2023 by Zhuo Li and headquartered in San Jose, California, builds a platform for evaluating and securing large language models under the AI trust, risk, and security management (AI TRiSM) umbrella. The company’s stated mission is to provide a one-stop solution for controlling risk and protecting sensitive data as organizations deploy large language models, addressing problems such as model vulnerabilities, data leakage, and unsafe or non-compliant outputs before they reach production.

HydroX AI’s flagship product, EPASS, launched alongside a $4 million angel funding round in late 2023 from Vitalbridge Capital, Atom Capital, and individual investors including Qi Lu, a former Microsoft executive vice president and former COO of Baidu. Founder Zhuo Li previously led the Privacy and Data Protection Office at ByteDance and worked at Meta and LinkedIn earlier in her career, giving the company a founding team with direct experience inside large-scale consumer AI and data-privacy organizations.

As an early-stage company with a small team and a single disclosed angel round, HydroX AI is best understood as an emerging entrant in the fast-growing but still-forming LLM security and AI TRiSM category, competing with a wave of similarly young AI red-teaming, model-evaluation, and AI governance startups as well as AI-security features being added by established security vendors. Its differentiation rests on its team’s enterprise AI-safety pedigree rather than yet-proven scale or independently validated efficacy.