Success at the Startup Insider Pitch Battle with AI application for better data protection

NENNA.AI wins Startup Insider Battle with innovative AI solution

NENNA.AI has won the Junge Startups Pitch Battle by Startup Insider. We are absolutely delighted to see that our software solution for the secure use of all AI models won over the jury:

"We can see that NENNA.AI is tackling a truly relevant problem with its solution. And we are excited to see how NENNA's journey develops, what features are still to come. We believe you have identified a highly relevant target audience. Preventing the shadow use of AI within companies is, of course, also a key issue. We are excited to see what the future holds for you."

– Isabelle Thierfelder, Investment Manager at seed+speed Ventures GmbH

In this article, you can listen to the podcast episodes and read the transcript of our product pitch. We will also take a closer look at some of the points and questions raised by the jury in the feedback episode.

NENNA.AI in a Nutshell: Our pitch for the Junge Startups Pitch Battle

In the podcast series Junge Startups Pitch Battle by Startup Insider, founders are given the opportunity to present their product in under 10 minutes. At the end of each week, a select jury of investors chooses one of the presented business models as the winner.

➡️ In calendar week 36 of 2024, our CEO and Co-Founder Lars Moll presented NENNA.AI.

Transcript of the NENNA.AI Pitch:

With NENNA.AI, we want to enable companies to work legally and securely with all available AI tools. What we have done? We have developed a software that detects personal data and intellectual property. This happens directly during prompting or when uploading documents. The data is masked and the prompts still work, and they do so with every AI tool on the market. In this way, we give companies back full control over their AI usage. NENNA is AI Enablement from Berlin.

What is your product and what problem do you solve?

We founded NENNA.AI because we saw in our previous roles that there is great uncertainty when it comes to data protection and working with AI.

We are a team of experienced founders, with successful exits in the B2B AI SaaS space, specialising in artificial intelligence, data management and machine learning. We have experience in large international companies.

We saw that customer data, company information or intellectual property should not end up on the servers of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the problem has not been solved adequately. Some companies might be slightly negligent, while others ban AI usage completely, just like many companies banned the internet back in the 90s. Yet the potential of AI is far too great to block, and that is where NENNA.AI comes in.

We offer companies a secure, convenient, easy-to-install solution to work with all AI tools in a GDPR-compliant manner. This immediately gets companies out of liability risks, helps them get a grip on shadow IT through the browser and, above all, looking forward, allows them to set up efficient processes and gain a competitive edge through their work with AI.

How does your business model work and who is your target audience?

Our business model is a classic SaaS model that is based on usage within the company and can grow alongside it. We start with team sizes of 20 to 30 seats and can also roll out across the entire enterprise, serving 1,000+ seats and more. We currently have pilot projects live in sectors such as legal, consulting, marketing and finance.

With NENNA.AI, companies have complete flexibility and decide for themselves how they want to use us: for data control or to gain insights into their own AI usage in order to build their own business models or AI processes. We target companies with high data protection requirements: law firms, consultancies, marketing agencies, financial service providers and increasingly departments such as sales, HR and communications.

The platform integrates seamlessly into existing systems and offers GDPR-compliant access to AI tools. A particular highlight is our AI Insights. Companies using NENNA.AI can securely store and analyse data about their AI usage, which is ideal for training their own AI models. This finally gives you valuable insights into data that has previously often been lost and only seen by the LLM providers.

NENNA.AI aims for long-term, strategic partnerships. We are currently building a reseller structure to make the platform available locally and through strong partnerships.

How do you differ from market competitors and where do you see yourself in three years?

While other providers offer individual solutions for specific tools or complex setups, we secure all AI tools in the company comprehensively and ready to go instantly. NENNA.AI stands for maximum data security and simple integration. All common AI tools can be protected via a single platform.

We are from Germany and Berlin, we understand GDPR, we understand data protection and we know what is legally necessary and technically possible to guarantee it. We focus on strategic growth, customer success and technical excellence, and we have big plans: in three years, we want to be the leading platform for secure AI usage in Europe.

Alongside NENNA.AI, hoorai. hoorai and Boolee were also nominated. hoorai. hoorai helps companies identify internal talent and optimise teams. Boolee enables companies to perform complex data analyses without any technical background knowledge.

Secure AI Usage with NENNA: Experts Discuss Data Protection and Future Perspectives

Our jury consisted of Isabelle Thierfelder, Investment Manager at seed+speed Ventures GmbH, and Martin Möllmann, Senior Investment Manager of High-Tech Gründerfonds. From minute 13:15, the two discuss the benefits that NENNA.AI can bring, and ➡️ from minute 20:10, the winner is announced.

Both jurors were already well aware of the data protection issues when working with generative AI. They could see the advantage and potential of a tool that allows the intuitive masking of private data, unlocking the use of applications that would otherwise have to be avoided for data privacy reasons.

Why NENNA.AI remains essential for secure and future-oriented AI usage

Despite great praise, the jury raised two points of concern regarding the use of NENNA.AI, and we would like to address these further.

1. To what extent could masking the prompt with NENNA affect the quality of the answers?

We can completely alleviate any concern here, as NENNA.AI masks the data but does not affect the responses of the LLMs. The models handle the masked tokens very well and are fully capable of working with them and delivering meaningful results.

An often misunderstood aspect of using NENNA.AI is which details are affected by data protection and which are not. This concerns sensitive and personal data, but not generalised requests of publicly available information. NENNA.AI does not need to be applied when requesting a summary of a company's services or the life of public figures based on freely accessible data.

We can also address the example of data series mentioned in the podcast. While it makes little sense to anonymise these for an evaluation, this can certainly be done with the associated labels (e.g. column names). This makes the data analysable but hides its meaning from the model.

2. Could the functionality of NENNA.AI simply be built into existing LLMs as a feature in the future, rendering the tool obsolete?

The question of whether NENNA.AI's masking feature will find its way into large AI models in another form is certainly legitimate. It also proves just how relevant NENNA.AI's masking function is. However, companies need a solution to this problem right now, not in some distant future. The prospect of a built-in solution sounds plausible, but NENNA.AI is ready to use immediately for over 200 AI applications. Furthermore, this also applies to solutions developed in-house by companies.

Even if major models like ChatGPT and Gemini develop similar features, this will not apply to smaller companies that do not have the capacity for such an option. The market is changing rapidly: many smaller products come and go before the option of a mask that protects private data is even introduced. Other free applications will quickly disappear behind paywalls when a comparable option is added. NENNA.AI thus helps to use small tools in a GDPR-compliant way. This also ensures variety in the market and better chances for new tools.

Lastly, the question of hosting remains open: the masked data is temporarily stored in our cloud, which is hosted in Germany. Other providers, potentially from international companies, cannot promise this and often do not have the high standards required for GDPR-compliant data storage.

Even as NENNA.AI's business model continues to establish itself, our product offers clear benefits over alternatives, especially for European companies.

Data Security and Innovation: A relevant solution to a relevant problem

With our innovative software solution, we have proven that GDPR-compliant and efficient AI usage for companies is not a future vision but a practical reality. The recognition by the jury of the Junge Startups Pitch Battle shows that we are not only addressing a relevant problem but also offering a viable market solution, one that helps companies make their processes secure and competitive.

"NENNA is a solution that addresses a currently highly relevant problem for many companies that would love to do more in this area but perhaps simply cannot do so, due to respect or a certain fear that plays a part, and as a result suffer a competitive disadvantage, for example compared to foreign companies that face fewer restrictions than firms in Europe. That is why NENNA is definitely a relevant tool."

– Martin Möllmann, Senior Investment Manager of High-Tech Gründerfonds

Have we sparked your interest? If you want to learn more about NENNA.AI and our AI Enablement platform for companies, you can find our demo here. For further questions and comments, you can also find us on LinkedIn.