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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Bilan, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Joining me are Rick Kacia, CEO of Witness AI, building what they call the confidence layer of Enterprise AI.

And Barmak Mefta, former president of AT&T cybersecurity and current partner and co-founder at Ballistic Ventures, the Cybersecurity Focus VC that incubated Witness AI.

Rick Barmec, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having you.

Great to be here.

Really excited to have you both here because, you know, with generative AI, it seems like AI security is just becoming, there's just so many layers to this onion of how many ways we have expanded the attack surface for cybersecurity.

And, you know, Witness AI was recently named on the 2025 Fortune CyberSixie.

You're building the guardrails for generative AI models.

What does that mean exactly?

Yeah, that's a good question. Let me just tell you how our

customers have sort of gone through the layers. So the first layer for our customers, go back a

couple of years. Think about after ChatGPT hit the scene in November, 2022. Every corporate employee

that I know went and started playing with this thing and a lot of companies had situations where

people shared things they shouldn't have shared customer data marketing plans financial data so the

first layer was how do we make sure our employees are using somebody else's AI in the form of some

chat bot chat GPT Gemini so forth safely. Layer one, protect my data.

Then people started thinking, well, gosh, these AI bots are actually starting to tell my employees things,

and they might be guiding them to do something harmful or criminal, so another layer is protect what comes back.

Then, last year, we started seeing customers build their own models, stand

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