Meta is bringing in the founders of Virtue AI, a startup that has carved out a reputation in the AI safety and security space since its founding in 2024. The move signals that even the largest tech companies are willing to poach top talent from specialized startups to shore up their AI defenses.
Virtue AI raised $30 million in funding in April 2025 and counts organizations like Uber and Glean among its clients. Its platform focuses on automated red-teaming, which is essentially stress-testing AI systems to find vulnerabilities before bad actors do, along with compliance tools designed for enterprise customers.
Who are the Virtue AI founders
CEO Bo Li and Chief AI Officer Sanmi Koyejo have been developing adversarial machine learning frameworks since approximately 2014. The team received the NeurIPS Best Paper award and an NSA award for their work on “Decoding Trust,” a framework that evaluates the trustworthiness of large language models. Gartner has also featured Virtue AI in its Hype Cycles for agentic AI and Site Reliability Engineering in 2026.
Virtue AI had positioned itself as a go-to platform for frontier AI labs and major enterprises alike. Losing its founding team to Meta would represent a significant shift in the AI safety talent landscape, concentrating expertise that was previously accessible to a broader set of clients into a single corporate entity.
