- White Circle has raised $11M in seed funding from operators and investors across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Hugging Face, Mistral, Datadog, and Sentry.
- Founded by engineer Denis Shilov after his viral 2024 universal jailbreak exposed safety flaws in major AI models, White Circle helps companies monitor, control, and secure AI systems in production.
- The company has already processed more than 1 billion API requests and works with customers, including Lovable and two of the world’s largest digital banks.
Paris-based AI control platform White Circle has secured $11 million in seed funding from leading figures across the AI ecosystem, including Romain Huet of OpenAI, Durk Kingma of Anthropic, Guillaume Lample of Mistral, Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face, Olivier Pomel of Datadog, François Chollet of Keras, Mehdi Ghissassi and Paige Bailey of DeepMind, and David Cramer of Sentry.
Founded by Denis Shilov, White Circle emerged after Shilov gained widespread attention in 2024 for publishing a universal jailbreak that bypassed the safety systems of major AI models, including ChatGPT and Claude. The viral post attracted interest from companies including Anthropic and Hugging Face, eventually leading Shilov to join Anthropic’s bug bounty programme before launching White Circle to address growing concerns around AI reliability and security in production environments.
“AI is moving faster than our ability to guide it,” says Shilov. “We already trust it with decisions that touch millions of people, from healthcare and finance to hiring and security, but most companies still lack visibility into what their models are actually doing once deployed. White Circle gives organisations a single platform to monitor, control, and improve AI behaviour in real time without sacrificing security or compliance.”
White Circle provides a unified API that monitors AI inputs and outputs in real time, helping enterprises detect hallucinations, prompt injection attacks, harmful content, model drift, and abusive users. Companies can create custom enforcement policies, automate moderation actions such as rate limiting or banning users, and analyse model performance across different use cases. The platform also learns from labelled feedback to improve over time and supports more than 150 languages.
The company says its infrastructure has already processed more than one billion API requests and is currently used by customers, including Lovable and two of the world’s largest digital banks. White Circle is also SOC 2 Type I and II certified and HIPAA compliant.
Beyond its commercial platform, White Circle has also published AI safety research, including CircleGuardBench, a benchmark measuring moderation model performance under real-world conditions, and KillBench, a large-scale study examining biases in AI decision-making across more than one million experiments involving models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.
The company operates in the broader AI observability and governance market alongside firms such as Arthur AI and WhyLabs, while larger infrastructure and monitoring companies, including Datadog and Scale AI have also expanded AI monitoring capabilities.
With the latest funding, White Circle plans to use the funding to accelerate product development, expand its team across the US, UK, and Europe, and grow its global enterprise customer base.
“Denis and the White Circle team have an unusual combination of deep technical credibility and a clear commercial instinct,” says Ophelia Cai, Partner at Tiny VC. “The KillBench research alone shows what’s possible when you approach AI safety empirically rather than ideologically, and the team is building infrastructure the industry genuinely needs.”
