Ent, an intent-aware workspace security company, has emerged from stealth with $100m in seed financing, positioning itself as a challenger to the cybersecurity industry’s longstanding reliance on reactive threat detection.
The round was led by Decibel, with Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel (IQT) all participating in the raise.
Ent’s core argument is that AI has fundamentally compressed the gap between a breach occurring and its consequences taking hold, making post-incident detection an insufficient primary line of defence. The company’s platform is designed to assess and act on risky behaviour by both humans and AI agents at the moment it occurs, rather than after the damage is done. It currently serves Global 2000 organisations spanning hospitality, financial services, and defence, where use cases include insider risk detection, AI usage governance, data loss prevention, last-mile threat mitigation, and post-incident investigation with full behavioural context.
Technically, the platform is hosted within a customer’s own cloud environment, preserving complete data sovereignty. It operates via a lightweight endpoint agent that applies AI reasoning to assess intent as it occurs across applications, browsers, workflows, data transfers, and local runtimes. Rather than relying on static rules tied to process or file events, it evaluates human and AI agent behaviour at the moment of action and applies customer-defined policy through configurable, real-time interventions.
The company was founded on the belief that the cybersecurity industry has been caught in a cycle of reactive response for well over a decade and that today’s AI-driven threat environment demands a fundamental rethink. By operating at the workspace layer where human activity and AI agent behaviour converge, Ent aims to provide the contextual intelligence that existing endpoint and identity tools cannot.
Ent CEO and co-founder Elias Manousos said, “Security has been stuck in a reactive loop for over a decade, but AI-powered attacks require new thinking. AI is changing both how people work and how quickly attackers can act. What once took days now happens in seconds. By the time traditional security systems detect a problem, it is too late. We believe the future of security lies in understanding intent in real time across people and AI agents and stopping risk before it becomes an incident.”
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