Lakera

Lakera is a European AI security company specializing in protecting LLM-powered applications from prompt injection attacks, data leakage, and other generative AI-specific threats. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Lakera has built a focused and developer-friendly platform that enables organizations to secure their LLM applications with minimal integration effort. The company's European roots give it a natural alignment with EU data protection and AI regulation requirements, making it particularly attractive to organizations subject to GDPR and the EU AI Act. Lakera's flagship product, Lakera Guard, operates as a real-time security layer that intercepts and analyzes prompts and responses flowing to and from LLMs. The platform detects and blocks prompt injection attempts, jailbreak attacks, toxic content generation, PII exposure, and other common LLM security threats. Lakera Guard is designed for easy integration via a simple API call, allowing development teams to add security controls to their LLM applications in minutes rather than weeks. This developer-first approach has made Lakera popular among startups and mid-market companies rapidly deploying generative AI features. The company's threat detection capabilities are powered by a proprietary AI model trained on one of the largest datasets of prompt injection attacks, sourced in part through Gandalf, Lakera's public interactive game that challenges users to trick an LLM into revealing a secret password. This gamified approach to threat intelligence gathering has attracted millions of interactions, providing Lakera with a continuously growing corpus of real-world attack patterns that improve its detection accuracy over time. Lakera offers a freemium pricing model, with a free tier that allows developers to test and evaluate the platform before committing to a paid plan. The commercial tiers provide higher throughput, advanced analytics, and enterprise features. The platform integrates with popular LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source models, as well as cloud platforms and CI/CD tools. While Lakera's focused scope on LLM security means it does not address broader ML model security concerns like adversarial attacks on traditional models, its depth of expertise in the LLM security space and ease of integration make it a compelling choice for organizations prioritizing generative AI safety.