Technology

To state the obvious, the AI profitability halo has been very good for some companies and industries, but has also thrown up some unforeseen challenges around implementation. The most pressing is around security, such as using plain text prompts in AI, which introduces the risk of data leakage and information theft. A Gartner survey into AI adoption from 2025 had it that 48% of participants in leading-edge companies said they were concerned about security threats, and 29% were concerned by data availability or quality.

In hindsight, Protopia AI, which is focused on preserving privacy, was founded at exactly the right time, in 2020, around two years before ChatGPT became a household name. Professor Hadi Esmaeilzadeh from the University of California, San Diego was working on AI privacy, and came up with the foundational technology. He was joined by Eiman Ebrahimi, who has a PhD in computer engineering, and who had been working at Nvidia. Ebrahimi now serves as CEO. In 2022, after two years of demonstrating the technology, Protopia AI announced it had raised $8mn, led by ATX Venture Partners, among others, and it was open for business.