Unbound Raises $4M to Help Companies Bring GenAI to Work – Without Sacrificing Security
June 20, 2025
byFenoms Startup Research
Unbound, a U.S.-based AI governance and security platform, has raised $4 million in seed funding to help enterprises unlock the power of generative AI - without losing visibility, control, or data integrity.
Founded by Vignesh Subbiah, Unbound provides IT and security leaders with a single interface to manage GenAI tool usage across apps, teams, and agents, ensuring that innovation can scale inside organizations without exposing sensitive information or violating compliance policies.
The round was backed by Race Capital, Wayfinder Ventures, Massive Tech Ventures, Y Combinator, Alpha Square Group, Northside Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and strategic angel investors from the cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS world.
What Unbound Does
Unbound is building the secure layer enterprises need to embrace GenAI confidently. The platform provides:
- Visibility and auditing of all GenAI tools and prompts used across a company
- Policy enforcement to prevent unauthorized data exposure or shadow AI usage
- Granular controls over inputs, outputs, and data retention
- A unified dashboard to track GenAI ROI, productivity, and risk in real time
- Integrations with widely used tools (Slack, Notion, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, etc.)
At its core, Unbound helps enterprises adopt the latest AI tools without becoming ungovernable. It’s not about restricting AI - it’s about unlocking its full value without introducing new blind spots.
Why This Problem Is Urgent
The average enterprise is now using over 90 different SaaS tools, and with the explosion of GenAI agents, copilots, and plugins, that number is accelerating.
IT and security teams are struggling to keep up:
- Unauthorized LLM usage is now the #1 shadow IT risk in over 40% of enterprises (Gartner, 2024)
- 74% of security leaders say they’ve had at least one incident tied to GenAI usage in the last 12 months (DataDog AI Security Index)
- Most existing tools are built for SaaS management, not LLM behavior tracking, which leaves a critical visibility gap
- Regulatory compliance around AI inputs, PII exposure, and retention is tightening in the EU, US, and APAC - exposing enterprises to legal and reputational risk
Unbound is offering a framework not just to detect GenAI usage - but to design around it, monitor it, and shape it to company values.
The Real Innovation: Security That Doesn’t Kill Speed
Unbound’s most critical unlock wasn’t just visibility into GenAI tools - it was how they reframed the tension between innovation and control. Security teams want guardrails. AI teams want freedom. And Unbound gave both sides what they needed, not by compromising, but by building a shared system that speaks both languages.
This is what makes Unbound so compelling: they didn’t just address the security risks of GenAI - they built the coordination fabric that lets an enterprise scale experimentation without losing control. In a world where every team is deploying agents, copilots, and internal GPTs, the real risk isn’t just shadow IT - it’s shadow intelligence: knowledge and logic that lives in prompts no one can see or govern.
That insight is what other founders can learn from. In B2B AI, the biggest opportunity isn't in creating faster tools. It's in designing systems of orchestration, where trust, transparency, and velocity aren’t at odds - but compounded together. If you can turn chaos into collaboration without slowing down your users, you're not just building infrastructure - you’re writing the playbook for how the modern enterprise learns in public. Unbound understood that from day one.
Market Outlook: The GenAI Governance Stack Is Still Wide Open
With GenAI adoption rising exponentially across industries, managing that adoption is becoming one of the biggest enterprise software opportunities in years.
- The enterprise GenAI market is projected to hit $98 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of over 42% (IDC)
- 80% of CIOs surveyed by McKinsey plan to increase investment in AI tools in 2025 - but over half say they lack visibility into how those tools are being used
- The AI security and observability market is projected to exceed $13 billion by 2030, driven by LLM governance, auditability, and real-time risk controls (Fortune Business Insights)
- 58% of enterprises have already faced issues with hallucinated AI output being mistaken as factual, according to Gartner - raising legal and operational risks
- New guidelines from the EU AI Act and U.S. NIST AI RMF are beginning to formalize best practices around AI lifecycle management, which includes tools like Unbound’s
This isn't just a security problem - it's a platform opportunity. The company that defines how GenAI is safely managed inside the enterprise won’t just be a vendor. It will become part of every CIO’s default stack.
What’s Next for Unbound?
With this $4 million seed round, Unbound is scaling its platform to serve mid-market and large enterprises deploying GenAI across multiple teams and functions.
Immediate next steps include:
- Deepening integrations with the top 50 enterprise SaaS and GenAI tools
- Building self-serve governance templates for finance, healthcare, and legal teams
- Expanding policy automation powered by semantic prompt inspection
- Hiring across product, security engineering, and GTM
- Launching a compliance partner program for audit firms and consultancies
Long term, Unbound aims to become the control layer for enterprise AI - the system of record not just for what AI can do, but for how it should be done.