🛡️ Growth Capital Podcast — Episode 89 🛡️

What if your biggest AI risk isn't a hacker, but an employee who's just trying to get their job done faster?

In this episode of the Growth Capital Podcast, Justin Dixon sits down with Arti Raman, Founder & CEO of Portal26. This AI adoption management platform helps enterprises discover, secure, and get real value from the AI already running through their business. Arti built her first company in 2019 around data encryption, years before AI became mainstream, and pivoted the entire business in the months after ChatGPT launched, redirecting existing capital and technology toward an entirely new problem: shadow AI.

This conversation goes far beyond a typical security discussion. It's a look at how AI usage is quietly spreading across every department, why the biggest risk isn't always a data breach, and why some of the most dangerous exposure a company faces right now is financial, not just technical.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why most companies have no visibility into how employees are already using AI
• What "token explosion" is, and how it can quietly wipe out a budget in minutes
• Why agentic AI creates legal liability that traditional security tools were never built to catch
• Why AI hasn't cut headcount at Portal26, even as productivity has multiplied
• Why early-career hiring is genuinely harder now, and what needs to change about it
• How Arti pivoted a fully funded company without losing her investors' trust

Whether you're a founder rolling out AI across your organization, an investor evaluating AI-driven risk, or an operator trying to understand your own blind spots, this episode offers a practical framework for thinking about AI adoption before it becomes a liability.

Connect with Arti Raman 🌐 Website: https://portal26.ai/ 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arti-arora-raman/

🔔 If you found this conversation valuable, give the video a like, share it with a leader rolling out AI across their team, and subscribe for more in-depth conversations with the founders, investors, and operators shaping the future of technology and business.

💬 Tell us in the comments: Does your company actually know how employees are using AI today, or is that still a blind spot?