Calypso AI (now F5 AI Guardrails)

https://www.f5.com/products/ai-guardrails

Dublin / NYC founded 2018; GenAI security and content scanning. $23M Series A-1 Aug-2024 (Paladin Capital + Lockheed Martin Ventures). Pivoted from defence ML to enterprise GenAI guardrails 2023-24.

Acquired. acquired by F5; now F5 AI Guardrails Source · Alternatives and migration notes →

Acquired · Verified 2026-10-28 · fresh as of 2026-10-28 · 18 cited facts, 0 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction

At a glance

Tier
T2
Created
2018 (founded) vendor fix
Latest release
not applicable — wrong section fix
License
not applicable — not OSS fix
GitHub
not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
Pricing
not applicable — wrong section fix
Freshness
2026-10-28 fix
Layer
agent-infra repo fix
Licensing
commercial vendor fix
Deployment locus
local vendor fix
Platform vs product
platform vendor fix

When to use

Optimised for: enterprise GenAI scanner + LLM red-team

Anti-fit: not applicable — wrong section

Pros & cons

Pros

Defence pedigree; Lockheed-backed; mature commercial product; multi-model scanner.

Cons

Older brand identity; pivoted from earlier ML-security thesis; less GenAI-native than 2023-vintage rivals.

Claims & capabilities

$23M Series A-1 Aug-2024 (Paladin + Lockheed Martin Ventures); >$38M total raised; defence pedigree

Technical surface

API surface
not applicable — wrong section
Backend storage
not applicable — wrong section
Deployment
not applicable — wrong section
Embedding model
not applicable — not a memory product
Multi-tenancy
not applicable — wrong section
MCP
not applicable — wrong section
A2A
not applicable — wrong section
OpenTelemetry
not applicable — wrong section

Similar systems

Other use-case-specific agent harnesses in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.

  • Salesforce Agentforce T1

    Cross-listing: Salesforce Agentforce already exists under Vertical / Customer-support / voice memory; this row is the Agent-harness framing — Agentforce as the consumer-facing agent IDE / builder on Data Cloud. Agentforce launched Sep-2024; Agentforce 2.0 announced Dec-2024.

  • Lasso Security T2

    Tel-Aviv-founded LLM security platform — adversarial testing, prompt-injection defence, data-leakage prevention. $6M seed Nov-2023 (Entrée Capital + Samsung Next).

  • Pillar Security T2

    Tel-Aviv-founded (Dor Sarig + Ziv Karliner, both ex-IDF cyber); end-to-end LLM security platform — discovery, red-teaming, runtime guardrails. $9M seed Apr-2024 (Shield Capital + Greenfield).

  • Promptfoo T2

    OSS (MIT) prompt-engineering eval and red-team CLI; supports OWASP LLM Top-10 vulnerability tests, jailbreak generation, and CI/CD pipeline integration. $5M seed Mar-2024 (Andreessen Horowitz). Founders ex-Discord + ex-Smile Identity.

  • Protect AI T2

    Founded 2022 by Ian Swanson + Daryan Dehghanpisheh (ex-AWS); AI/ML supply-chain + GenAI security. Acquired by Palo Alto Networks (2025-07-22; announced Apr-2025, reported $700M); its capabilities now ship in Prisma AIRS. Products: Recon (red-team), ModelScan (model artifact scanner), Sightline (vulnerability DB).

  • Garak T3

    OSS (Apache 2.0) LLM vulnerability scanner — 'nmap for LLMs.' Originally Leon Derczynski (Univ Sheffield / ITU Copenhagen); NVIDIA now stewards the project. Tests for jailbreaks, prompt injection, hallucination, data leakage. Apache-2.0.

Sources (17 cited facts, 0 third-party)

Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).

What changed

Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)

  1. 2026-10-28
    • Name “Calypso AI” → “Calypso AI (now F5 AI Guardrails)”
    • Homepage “https://calypsoai.com/” → “https://www.f5.com/products/ai-guardrails”
    • Funding / ownership “$23M Series A-1 Aug-2024 (Paladin + Lockheed; >$38M total)” → “Raised over $40M in venture funding; acquired by F5 for $180M purchase consideration (announced 2025-09-11)” source
    #293

Related systems

Referenced by (3)

  • NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails integrates with — NeMo Guardrails docs have a F5 AI Guardrails third-party guardrail page. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Portkey AI integrates with — Portkey docs have a F5 Guardrails guardrails integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • TrueFoundry AI Gateway integrates with — TrueFoundry AI Gateway ecosystem lists a F5 CalypsoAI guardrails integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)