FireTail

FireTail is a McLean, Virginia-based security company founded in 2021 by Jeremy Snyder and Riley Priddle. It started as an API security platform — discovering APIs, testing them, and monitoring runtime traffic for abuse — but has since repositioned almost entirely around AI security and governance, reflecting where enterprise risk has actually been moving. The current product finds where employees and internal applications are using AI (including unsanctioned "shadow AI" tools), scores the risk of each use case, and flags specific threats such as prompt injection attempts and AI-driven data leaks.

The company raised $5 million in early-stage financing in December 2022, led by Paladin Capital Group with participation from Zscaler and angel investors including SentinelOne’s VP of Cloud Security, Intel 471’s CEO, and Shift5’s CEO — a notable group of security-industry operators rather than purely financial backers. FireTail has continued operating on that raise since, with no additional publicly disclosed funding rounds found as of this writing.

FireTail’s differentiation is combining its original API-level visibility (which is how a lot of AI usage actually flows in and out of an organization) with AI-specific governance controls, rather than building a bolt-on AI monitoring tool with no runtime traffic context. That said, the company is small (under 25 employees) and its current AI-security product line is relatively new, so independently verified efficacy evidence — named customers, breach-prevention data, third-party testing — is not yet publicly available.