Member Spotlight - Redactive — FinTech Australia

In an era where generative AI captures headlines and the imagination of executives, in execution enterprises face the challenge of getting AI use cases live under the constraints of stringent information security requirements. Co-founded by ex-Atlassians Alexander Valente and Andrew Pankevicius, Redactive specifically set out to unblock enterprise adoption by solving access control for AI applications in compliant industries.

Concept and Founding

Amid the generative AI hype last year, they recognized a gap in the open-source community's approach to AI application development. "While the open-source community was filled with interesting projects that set up proof of concepts of what AI could do, we believed that enterprises would struggle to adopt generative AI without their very specific security needs being fulfilled to get these use cases into production" Andrew explained. The inception of Redactive started with a question ‘what if we considered the information security and permissions access control needs of an enterprise and reversed that out into a really easy to use developer platform for software engineers to build AI enabled features or products that can seamlessly go through information security reviews?’.

The Mission and Services Offered

Redactive sets itself apart as a developer platform that bridges AI applications with permissioned data. Pankevicius outlines the platform's mission: "to ensure that the right user can only access and see the right information across their business when leveraging an AI application."

What's common across Banks, Insurers and really any large company is that the data that is truly useful is fragmented, decentralised across lots of different tools and has access controls and permissions against it meaning some people in the organisation can see it and others can't. To quote Atlassian, the average employee has access to about 24 different tools inside of their company that they have access to. Redactive ensures that businesses can connect AI systems to all of these different systems securely and pull only relevant information on behalf of the employee when they, or an application prompts for it.

This allows us to unlock a new category of AI enabled productivity use cases that can fully leverage permissioned data, of which the rest of the market of developer tooling is failing to unlock for enterprises. To name a few of the use cases we unlock include permissions aware knowledge base search, Human-in-the loop, sensitive data custom service agents, risk reporting bots to the attached to processes within banking systems, to name a few.

Overcoming Industry Challenges

Navigating the complexities of AI adoption in the FSI enterprise space poses significant challenges, primarily around education and security. Andrew notes, "The interesting component that we're actually starting to focus on is a lot of education." Through strategic partnerships and community engagement with groups like FinTech Australia, Redactive is leading the charge in demystifying permissioned aware AI for businesses, enabling them to harness its power responsibly and effectively.

A strong team with deep experience in high scale technology companies and regulated banking environments coming together.

As co-founders, we have a strong background from Atlassian with an expertise in data residency and building developer platforms. We understand deeply what a software engineer is facing and the specific enterprise challenges they encounter to get use cases to ‘go live’ to customers or employees.

But what supports us is that we have an incredibly strong technical team with people from AWS & ANZ, Postman & Docusign. We are continuing to grow our team with people that genuinely have a conceptual understanding and depth of expertise around chunking, embedding, vector and vector stores, live permissions and fetching. These are all the really scary technical buzzwords that are flying around right now when Enterprises are thinking of adopting AI. As we are experts in this space we abstract away this complexity to enable Enterprise software teams to move fast and focus on the customer problem they are solving, whilst leaving the complex data engineering to the Redactive platform.

Navigating the AI market and the road ahead

The interesting component which is unique about operating in the AI space is that it’s incredibly in vogue, everyone wants to talk to you but it's really important to identify who are those that are genuinely making Investments and bets into the AI space and ensuring that we get to those people and communicate directly to them. We really thrive and move fast to support motivated Enterprises and fintechs that have started to build AI proof of concepts. We want to get to them as soon as possible to help them unblock their information security challenges and uplevel their application to not only get to production, but uplevel it with access to realtime, permissions aware data - which currently other platforms or even consultants in market cannot do.