Tenet Security, a North American cybersecurity firm focused on securing autonomous AI agents, has emerged from stealth with $6m in seed funding to tackle a growing and largely undetected threat facing enterprises deploying AI at scale.
The round was led by The Westly Group, an early backer of SentinelOne, alongside MizMaa Ventures. The capital will support continued product development, expansion of Tenet Threat Labs, growth of North American go-to-market operations, and broader coverage across emerging AI agent frameworks and enterprise environments.
At the heart of Tenet’s platform is a patent-pending capability the company calls Agent-side Simulation, which models the likely next steps an AI agent will take before those actions are carried out against live production systems. Where a given path is deemed risky, the platform can step in before harm is done and generate a record explaining why the action was stopped.
The platform is designed to prevent a range of threats at runtime, including unauthorised access, data exfiltration, agent manipulation, and a new category the company has coined “Agentjacking,” where malicious instructions hidden inside emails, logs, documents, or databases can silently redirect an agent’s behaviour with potentially severe consequences. Whereas conventional security tools raise alerts only after suspicious activity has already taken place, Tenet is built to intervene before an agent acts.
The company was founded by offensive security veterans Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran, who previously helped construct Cisco’s AI Defense function and led early research into threats targeting autonomous AI systems. Before their time at Cisco, the pair co-founded Wild Pointer, a cybersecurity firm that counted Fortune 500 companies among its clients and grew to a seven-figure annual revenue.
Both founders are regular speakers at major security conferences, including DEF CON and Black Hat. Having watched at close quarters as enterprises rushed to deploy AI agents, Sternberg and Poran concluded that the sector’s central AI security problem would not be defending the models themselves, but governing what autonomous agents do once they are handed access to real systems, data, and workflows. That conclusion brought them to launch Tenet Security.
Tenet’s mission is to enable enterprises to roll out autonomous agents at scale without accumulating unmanaged security exposure. The company argues that organisations frequently have as many as five times more AI agents operating across their environments than their security teams are aware of, producing visibility and governance gaps that existing tools were not built to address.
Research from Tenet Threat Labs has documented Agentjacking as a distinct and validated attack class. Testing across more than 100 enterprise environments identified thousands of organisations as potentially vulnerable via publicly accessible attack paths. Because agents in these scenarios were functioning within their authorised permissions, the activity consistently went undetected by conventional security controls. Real-world deployments have further illustrated the operational stakes.
A legal-sector enterprise with approximately $1bn in annual recurring revenue expanded its AI agent usage from two deployments to more than twenty over six months whilst using Tenet’s platform. During that window, the company says it detected and blocked more than ten attempted attacks, including a critical cross-site scripting attack. In a separate Fortune 1000 deployment, Tenet identified a runaway agent generating tens of thousands of dollars in superfluous token costs over a single weekend before the situation could escalate further.
The company is advised by David Schwed, former CISO of Robinhood; Rick Scott, former CISO of BNY; Israel Bryski, former CISO of MIO Partners; Tomer Schwartz, co-founder at Dazz; and Lior Tal, former CEO of Coralogix, alongside other cybersecurity and enterprise technology leaders.
Tenet Security co-founder and CEO Barak Sternberg said, “AI agents may be the biggest productivity unlock enterprises have seen in decades, which is why organizations are moving so quickly to deploy them. But we’re also entering a world where autonomous agents are interacting with systems, data, and other agents in ways most security tools were never designed to understand. That creates an entirely new security layer that requires a fundamentally different approach to protection.”
Tenet Security co-founder and CTO Nevo Poran said, “We’re increasingly seeing AI agents become part of the attack path itself. Attackers can manipulate agents to access sensitive data, abuse privileges, or take actions on their behalf in ways traditional security tools were never designed to detect. The challenge isn’t simply monitoring prompts or API traffic, but understanding and controlling agent behavior in real time. The only place left to catch these threats is at runtime, in the moment an agent decides to act.”
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