Resect AI, an enterprise AI startup headquartered in the small town of Washougal, Washington, launched out of stealth on 3 September 2026 with $25 million in funding. The round, led by undisclosed private-equity investors, funds engineering, go-to-market and a new Seattle-area office as the company chases the fast-growing market for LLM guardrails.
Inside The Model, Not After It
Traditional monitoring tools evaluate a large language model’s output after the fact and flag suspicious answers for a human reviewer. Resect AI takes a different approach. Its patented technology runs in-stream, looking inside the model in real time to observe internal decision-making, detect early signs of a fabrication and rewrite the offending tokens before they surface. Every intervention generates an audit trail so regulated industries — publishing, finance, healthcare, research, education — can prove what the model did and why.
Small Town, Big Enterprise Ambitions
Resect AI is led by co-founder and CEO Kevin Owens with CAIO Tim Walton, COO Tyler Gerber and CPMO Tommy Lofgren. The team of 30 is spread across greater Seattle, California, New York and Texas but headquartered in Washougal, a 18,000-person city on the Columbia River across from Portland, Oregon. Owens told GeekWire the community and access to Pacific Northwest AI talent tipped the decision, and the company plans to open a Seattle engineering office in the coming months while ramping headcount to 50 by year end.
Why Enterprises Are Buying Guardrails
Frontier labs including OpenAI and Anthropic are baking safety into base models, but enterprises still want model-agnostic middleware they can drop in front of any LLM. Resect is landing in the middle of a rush of AI-safety deals, from OpenAI saying its upcoming Astra model crosses the critical cyber threshold to AIR emerging from stealth with $50 million to build a firewall for AI agents and AISLE finding six new cURL CVEs that top-tier LLMs had missed.
Reporting based on coverage from GeekWire, PR Newswire and Tech Startups.