Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] on Tuesday said its ventures arm has made another strategic investment in adversarial artificial intelligence capabilities with an investment in the AI security company HiddenLayer

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The investment was part of a $50 million Series A funding round HiddenLayer announced last week led by M12, which is Microsoft’s [MSFT] venture capital fund, and includes IBM [IBM] Ventures, Capital One [COF] Ventures, and Ten Eleven Ventures.

Christopher Sestito, co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer. Photo: HiddenLayer

HiddenLayer, based in Austin, Texas was founded in March 2022. The startup is using the new investment to expand its workforce, increase sales efforts, and invest in its machine learning (ML) security platform.

The ML security platform is a suite of products using AI to protect ML models against adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities, and malicious code injections.

Booz Allen said the investment will boost its uses of adversarial AI for its customers in the Defense Department and intelligence community.

“Every AI-enabled solution should be assessed for risk and appropriately protected from adversarial attacks, especially as the government looks to deploy AI capabilities in increasingly important applications,” Matt Keating, leader of Booz Allen’s Adversarial AI portfolio, said in a statement. “Our clients operate in complex environments that require AI models be highly specialized, rapidly deployable, and secure. The HiddenLayer investment…better positions us to integrate startup, commercial, and open-source innovation to rapidly augment our existing capabilities.”

Booz Allen Ventures has previously invested in AI-related companies Shift5, Credo AI, Hidden Level, Latent AI, Synthetaic, and Reveal Technology.