Ent, an intent-aware workspace security company, has emerged from stealth with $100m in seed financing, aiming to shift the cybersecurity industry’s focus from reaction to prevention in an era of AI-accelerated attacks.
The round was led by Decibel, with participation from Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel (IQT).
Ent’s platform is designed to identify and intervene in risky behaviour by both humans and AI agents before those actions escalate into security incidents. The company says it is already live with Global 2000 customers across the hospitality, financial services, and defence sectors. Those customers are using Ent to address insider risk, govern AI usage, prevent data loss, counter last-mile threats, and support incident investigations with full behavioural context covering what occurred, the reasoning behind it, and recommended next steps.
The platform runs as a lightweight agent hosted within the customer’s own cloud environment, preserving complete data sovereignty. It monitors activity across applications, browsers, workflows, data movement, and local runtimes, evaluating the intent of both human users and AI agents at the point of action. Customer-defined policies are then applied, triggering configurable, just-in-time interventions before any incident can take hold.
Ent argues that conventional security tooling operates at the wrong layer, tethered to process and file events and therefore consistently too slow. As enterprises consolidate endpoint, identity, application, and data protection platforms, the company positions itself at what it calls the critical missing layer: one that reads intent across humans and AI agents in real time, at the workspace where activity actually takes place, spanning the browser, applications, AI workflows, and agents.
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.”
Decibel founding partner Jon Sakoda said, “AI has been a killer app for hackers and offensive researchers, but the industry is waiting for a novel defensive solution that can keep up with the modern era of LLMs. Ent has reimagined what is possible to protect the endpoint by using specialized AI models and adaptive policy enforcement to detect and prevent malicious activity in real time. It’s a game changer for cybersecurity teams who need a paradigm shift to defend their workforce against LLM-based attacks.”
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