Irregular raises $80 million to secure frontier AI models (techcrunch.com)

Irregular, formerly Pattern Labs, announced an $80 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures (with participation from Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport), valuing the AI security startup at about $450 million. The raise will scale the company's work securing “frontier” models — a growing industry priority as more economic activity shifts to human-on-AI and AI-on-AI interactions that can expose new attack surfaces, co‑founder Dan Lahav warned. Technically, Irregular is already influential: its SOLVE framework for scoring a model’s vulnerability-detection ability is widely used and cited in security evaluations for models like Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini. The startup emphasizes proactive discovery of emergent risks by running models in elaborate simulated environments and complex network simulations where AI agents act as both attackers and defenders, letting teams observe failure modes before public release. That capability is salient as models become better at finding software vulnerabilities and as major labs (including OpenAI) tighten internal security — positioning Irregular at the center of an intensifying defensive arms race to harden next‑generation AI systems.