Check Point Adds AI Application Defense With Lakera Purchase

Check Point Software bought an artificial intelligence security startup founded by a longtime AI practitioner to provide end-to-end security for AI usage and applications.

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The Silicon Valley-based platform security behemoth said its acquisition of San Francisco-based Lakera will address the dual challenge of protecting employee AI usage and securing AI-powered applications. The companies aim to integrate Lakera’s capabilities into Check Point’s GenAI Protect product as well as the company’s broader security infrastructure, including WAFs, network firewalls and email security.

“The scale and complexity of how these agents interact with each other is just beyond anything we’ve seen before,” Lakera founder and CEO David Haber told Information Security Media Group. “There’s a big question at play here, which is, ‘How can we make sure we trust these decisions?’ And that’s something that Lakera has set out to ultimately solve at scale.”

Lakera, founded in 2021, employs 60 people and has raised $30 million of outside funding, having most recently completed a $20 million Series A round led by Atomico in July 2024. The company has been led since its inception by Haber, who had spent three-and-a-half years leading AI at autonomous flight control vendor Daedalean AI (see: Check Point Buys Startup Veriti to Advance Threat Management).

What Set Lakera’s Approach to AI Security Apart

Modern AI agents make autonomous decisions, manage processes and handle sensitive operations at scale, creating entirely new attack surfaces, Haber said. The core issue is no longer data leakage or prompt injection, but about whether we can trust AI-driven decision-making with critical organizational functions. By joining Check Point, Haber said Lakera can scale its technology to a broader customer base.

“We spent about 15 years prior to Lakera, building AI that has to be absolutely safety and security critical,” Haber said. “One of the core motivations behind starting Lakera in the first place was to bring that security and safety to organizations all around the world. For us, this is an incredible opportunity to essentially bring that technology to hundreds of thousands of customers all around the world.”

Check Point Software Chief Strategy Officer Roi Karo said the strength of Lakera’s AI-specialist team, its differentiated product approach and the broader strategic value it could add to the firm’s AI road map made the acquisition appealing. Lakera’s decision to build its own foundational models rather than rely on third-party ones gave the company greater control over performance, accuracy, latency and cost.

“We found a very strong team of AI specialists,” Karo told Information Security Media Group. “In terms of the product itself, it seems like Lakera chose the harder but better way to solve the challenges many other teams are tackling by building their own foundational model. When we checked very thoroughly Lakera’s product, we were deeply impressed.”

When Check Point evaluated Lakera, the company was impressed not only by the technical sophistication but also by the scalability of the product, Karo said. The ability to handle massive prompt volumes, real-time response requirements and high-performance deployments made Lakera stand out from other M&A candidates. Lakera’s team worked on safety-critical AI systems for sectors where failure is not an option.

“If you look at Lakera as a company, our DNA is AI,” Haber said. “We’ve been on the ground building AI for the last 15 years, and we deeply understand the technology. One of the biggest challenges for security teams is to understand how the technology works. We are the partner for these organizations to help them understand how to navigate this fast-moving, often confusing and completely new world.”

How Check Point, Lakera Will Come Together

Karo said Lakera will first be integrated into Check Point’s GenAI Protect platform, which focuses on securing AI use at the employee level by preventing sensitive data leakage through LLM use. Beyond that, Karo said Integrating Lakera’s capabilities across the Check Point product ecosystem – including network firewalls, WAF and email security – would create a unified, 360-degree AI security offering.

“Everybody’s struggling with the same question – ‘How can I adopt AI in a very responsible, secure way?'” Karo said. “And now we have a better answer to this question.”

Check Point’s GenAI Protect ensures employees don’t leak confidential information or misuse AI tools, while Lakera’s platform secures the agents, models and applications interacting with organizational data and infrastructure, Karo said. This architecture also allows for intelligent sharing of data between endpoints and apps to improve security decisions, leading to better latency, accuracy and detection.

“If GenAI Protect is installed on the end user laptops, Lakera’s product will protect the applications themselves,” Karo said. “Together it provides a much better security for the application – 360 security around the application. That’s how both can be joined together.”

While others have made acquisitions in this space, Karo said Check Point believes it is the only vendor with a production-ready, full-stack platform that addresses both primary use cases in AI security. Unlike others, they’re not talking about road maps – they’re shipping products that work today. Joining GenAI Protect and Lakera creates a security platform that spans employees, applications and infrastructure.

“We’re playing for winning,” Karo said. “As we led many years ago the internet revolution, we will lead the AI revolution. We are market-ready. The products are ready. They are being tested in the field. We have real customers that are using it in production and seeing value.”