VentureBeat recently sat down (virtually) with Itamar Golan, co-founder and CEO of Prompt Security, to chat through the GenAI security challenges organizations of all sizes face. We talked about shadow AI sprawl, the strategic decisions that led Golan to pursue building a market-leading platform versus competing on features, and a real-world incident that crystallized why protecting AI applications isn’t optional anymore. Golan provided an unvarnished view of the company’s mission to empower enterprises to adopt AI securely, and how that vision led to SentinelOne’s estimated $250 million acquisition in August 2025.Golan’s path to founding Prompt Security began with academic work on transformer architectures, well before they became foundational to today’s large language models. His experience building one of the earliest GenAI-powered security features using GPT-2 and GPT-3 convinced him that LLM-driven applications were creating an entirely new attack surface. He founded Prompt Security in August 2023, raised $23 million across two rounds, built a 50-person team, and achieved a successful exit in under two years.The timing of our conversation couldn’t be better. VentureBeat analysis shows shadow AI now costs enterprises $4.63 million per breach, 16% above average, yet 97% of breached organizations lack basic AI access controls, according to IBM’s 2025 data. VentureBeat estimates that shadow AI apps could double by mid-2026 based on current 5% monthly growth rates. Cyberhaven data reveals 73.8% of ChatGPT workplace accounts are unauthorized, and enterprise AI usage has grown 61x in just 24 months. As Golan told VentureBeat in previous coverage, “We see 50 new AI apps a day, and we’ve already cataloged over 12,000. Around 40% of these default to training on any data you feed them, meaning your intellectual property can become part of their models.”The following has been edited for clarity and length.VentureBeat: What made you recognize that GenAI security needed a ded …
