Prompt Security's Itamar Golan on why generative AI security requires building a category, not a feature

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 ...