Protectt.ai, the Bessemer Venture Partners and Bajaj Finance-backed mobile app security company, is taking a controlling stake in AIShield, the AI security platform incubated within Bosch Global Software Technologies (BGSW). Bosch will keep a minority holding, and AIShield will continue to run as an independent entity under Protectt.ai. The deal value and closing timeline have not been disclosed.
The transaction combines a primary share issuance with a secondary purchase. Protectt.ai co-founder Manish Mimani said the structure includes cash, a secondary component and ESOPs, with further investment to follow based on what the business needs. It is Protectt.ai’s first acquisition since it set up a dedicated M&A team earlier this year.
Why it matters for banks and fintechs
Protectt.ai’s core business sits squarely in financial services. Its mobile threat defence platform helps app owners guard against cyber attacks and fraud, and it doubles as a compliance hub for rules issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The company says its technology runs on more than one billion mobile devices and handles about 15 billion app sessions a month.
As banking, payments and lending apps begin to embed AI agents, the attack surface is moving from the app screen to the models behind it. Mimani expects mobile apps to rely increasingly on AI agents to complete tasks, and said apps could become largely “UI-less” within one to two years. For regulated financial institutions, that raises new questions about model manipulation, prompt-based attacks and governance of autonomous agents.
What AIShield brings
Founded in 2022 by Shiv Kumar and Amit Phadke inside BGSW, AIShield builds security for machine learning models, generative AI applications and AI supply chains. Its tools are designed to help enterprises defend against adversarial attacks that try to manipulate AI systems, and to manage the compliance risks that come with deploying them.
Protectt.ai had already been working on AI model scanning and agent security. With AIShield, it aims to offer a full-stack AI security platform that reaches beyond mobile apps into wider enterprise use, including adversarial testing for agentic AI, security for Model Context Protocol connections between AI apps and external tools, and runtime monitoring and governance for AI agents.
Hiring and next steps
AIShield currently has about 12 to 15 employees and plans to grow to 50 to 60 by March 2027, hiring PhD researchers, master’s graduates and engineers to work on products, research and patents. Some members of Protectt.ai’s AI security team will move to AIShield. The unit will be able to raise external funding on its own and plans to work with private enterprises and government bodies on an India-built AI security platform.
Protectt.ai raised about $16 million in a Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Bajaj Finance in 2025. Mimani said the company is looking at further acquisitions or partnerships in API and cloud security, and may consider raising fresh capital in 2027.
For India’s BFSI sector, where digital channels now carry the bulk of customer transactions, the deal signals that security vendors are moving early to protect the AI layer that lenders, payment firms and banks are starting to put in front of customers.
