Tenet Security, a North America-based CyberTech startup focused on protecting autonomous AI agents from attack, has emerged from stealth with $6m in seed funding.
The round was co-led by The Westly Group, an early backer of SentinelOne, and MizMaa Ventures. The capital will fund ongoing product development, the expansion of Tenet Threat Labs, growth of the company’s North American go-to-market operations, and broader coverage across emerging AI agent frameworks and enterprise environments.
At the centre of Tenet’s offering is a patent-pending capability called Agent-side Simulation, which models an agent’s probable next actions before they are carried out against live systems. Where a potential action appears dangerous, the platform can step in ahead of execution and generate a trace that records the reason for the block.
The platform targets a range of runtime threats, including unauthorised access, data exfiltration, agent manipulation, and a category Tenet has termed “Agentjacking,” in which malicious content embedded in emails, documents, logs, databases or other data sources covertly alters how an agent behaves, potentially with severe consequences. Because these manipulated agents operate within their legitimately assigned permissions, the technique is capable of bypassing conventional security controls entirely.
The company was founded by Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran, both veteran offensive security researchers who previously helped build Cisco’s AI Defense programme, where they led early research into threats targeting autonomous AI systems. Before that, the pair co-founded Wild Pointer, a cybersecurity firm serving Fortune 500 clients that grew to a seven-figure annual revenue business. Both founders are recognised speakers at prominent security industry events, including DEF CON and Black Hat. Their conviction that existing tools were largely blind to what AI agents do once deployed in production ultimately led them to leave Cisco and launch Tenet. Tenet estimates that enterprises may be running as many as five times more AI agents than their security teams are aware of, creating significant visibility and governance gaps that traditional controls were not built to address.
Tenet Threat Labs has published research validating the Agentjacking technique across more than 100 enterprise environments and identified thousands of organisations potentially exposed through publicly accessible attack paths. Early platform deployments have provided concrete evidence of the risks at stake. A legal-sector enterprise with $1bn in annual recurring revenue expanded its AI agent usage from two to more than twenty deployments over a six-month window while using Tenet’s platform; during that time, more than ten attempted attacks, including a critical cross-site scripting attack, were identified and blocked. A separate Fortune 1000 deployment saw Tenet detect a runaway AI agent that had generated tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary token consumption over a single weekend before it could be scaled further.
Tenet Security is advised by a group of senior cybersecurity practitioners, including 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.
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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