AI security company Lasso Security today closed $30 million in fresh funding led by ClearSky and shipped LEAP, a transformer-free guardrail that runs on ordinary server CPUs with no GPU required, returning a verdict on prompts, tool calls and agent actions in under five milliseconds. Total funding in the Tel Aviv- and New York-headquartered company now tops $37 million.
Killing the guardian-agent tax
Most enterprises today put a reasoning LLM in front of every request as a guardian agent, which forces accelerated hardware into every inference and pushes costs so high that companies inspect only a slice of their AI traffic. LEAP removes that constraint, matching GPU-class detection accuracy at what Lasso says is thousands of times the throughput of existing guardrails, with no context-window cap.
Pairing LEAP with RAPID
LEAP is the first of two engines in the Lasso platform. RAPID, a self-hosted LLM-as-a-judge, handles the small share of decisions requiring plain-language policy judgment at 100 to 200 times lower cost than calling a cloud API. A tiered routing layer sends most traffic to LEAP for an inline decision and escalates only what genuinely needs deeper reasoning. Both engines are patent-pending, and the platform deploys inside customer clouds, regulated environments and air-gapped networks.
Attackers first, defenders second
Lasso reached this point by attacking AI systems before defending them. Its offensive team runs automated red teaming against customer apps and agents; in one healthcare engagement, red-teamers pulled every patient record and were able to alter prescriptions. The company said revenue has grown more than 500 percent in the past 12 months, with named customers including BMW, Leonardo Defense, eToro, Fiverr and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The round follows a wave of AI-security money that includes the industry's rogue-AI cyber-defense pact and Palo Alto Networks' Console buy. Existing seed lead Entree Capital increased its position, joined by iAngels, Singtel Innov8, Mindset and Swish Data.
Reporting based on coverage from SiliconANGLE and GlobeNewswire.