Hey HN. I'm sharing Protecto because we built something we wish existed when we were building AI agents at a startup.
The problem: This year, we spent 6 months talking to startup founders building with AI. The conversation was always the same. "We need to mask PII in customer data. Our compliance team won't let us ship without it. But the enterprise solutions are $50K/month and take 3 months to implement. We can't afford either."
We looked at existing privacy solutions. Enterprise tools (Imperva, Varonis) are over-engineered for startups. Database masking tools don't work for AI workflows (logs, embeddings, fine-tuning). Custom builds take forever. So most founders either shipped without protection or got blocked.
What we built: Protecto is an API that detects and masks PII in real-time. You add simple APIs to your LangChain/CrewAI/n8n workflow. It masks customer data before your LLM sees it, preserves semantic meaning (so your AI still works), and costs $250/month starting.
What's different:
1. We use LLMs for detection instead of regex. Catches context-dependent PII that pattern matching misses (99%+ accuracy vs ~80% for traditional approaches).
2. Context-aware masking. Instead of "[PII] [PII] has [PII]", we do "<PER>xyz<.PER> has diabetes" so your AI stays useful.
3. Low latency. We know performance matters for startups, so we optimized aggressively. Real-time processing adds negligible overhead.
4. Built for developers, not committees. No sales calls, no 3-month implementations. Free tier with 1,000 API calls (no credit card). Try it immediately.
We've been in beta with 50+ startups. Results:
- Series A fintech went from "compliance won't let us ship" to production in 48 hours
- Healthcare startup got HIPAA approval in 30 minutes
- AI platform launched 13 weeks earlier than planned
We're not claiming this is perfect. There are trade-offs (masking vs utility, accuracy vs speed). But for the 500+ startup teams building AI with customer data right now, this solves a real problem that enterprise solutions don't.
Free tier is test-ready. Try it. The backstory is in our blog post if you're curious why we built it.
Happy to answer technical questions about the approach.
mlshashikiran•1mo ago
The problem: This year, we spent 6 months talking to startup founders building with AI. The conversation was always the same. "We need to mask PII in customer data. Our compliance team won't let us ship without it. But the enterprise solutions are $50K/month and take 3 months to implement. We can't afford either."
We looked at existing privacy solutions. Enterprise tools (Imperva, Varonis) are over-engineered for startups. Database masking tools don't work for AI workflows (logs, embeddings, fine-tuning). Custom builds take forever. So most founders either shipped without protection or got blocked.
What we built: Protecto is an API that detects and masks PII in real-time. You add simple APIs to your LangChain/CrewAI/n8n workflow. It masks customer data before your LLM sees it, preserves semantic meaning (so your AI still works), and costs $250/month starting.
What's different:
1. We use LLMs for detection instead of regex. Catches context-dependent PII that pattern matching misses (99%+ accuracy vs ~80% for traditional approaches).
2. Context-aware masking. Instead of "[PII] [PII] has [PII]", we do "<PER>xyz<.PER> has diabetes" so your AI stays useful.
3. Low latency. We know performance matters for startups, so we optimized aggressively. Real-time processing adds negligible overhead.
4. Built for developers, not committees. No sales calls, no 3-month implementations. Free tier with 1,000 API calls (no credit card). Try it immediately.
We've been in beta with 50+ startups. Results:
- Series A fintech went from "compliance won't let us ship" to production in 48 hours - Healthcare startup got HIPAA approval in 30 minutes - AI platform launched 13 weeks earlier than planned
We're not claiming this is perfect. There are trade-offs (masking vs utility, accuracy vs speed). But for the 500+ startup teams building AI with customer data right now, this solves a real problem that enterprise solutions don't.
Free tier is test-ready. Try it. The backstory is in our blog post if you're curious why we built it.
Happy to answer technical questions about the approach.