Former Cisco AI Defense Builders Launch Tenet Security, Raise $6 Million to Prevent Attacks on Enterprise AI Agents

Emerging from Stealth, Tenet uses patent-pending Agent-side Simulation technology to predict and stop malicious AI agent behavior in real time before it reaches enterprise systems

WILMINGTON, Del.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tenet Security, a cybersecurity company focused on securing autonomous AI agents, today emerged from stealth with $6 million in seed funding led by The Westly Group, an early investor in SentinelOne, and MizMaa Ventures. The company is built around a patent-pending technology called Agent-side Simulation, which predicts and simulates an agent’s likely next actions before they execute against production systems. If a path appears risky, Tenet can intervene before damage occurs while providing a trace explaining why the action was blocked.

Founded by veteran offensive security researchers Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran, Tenet was created to address a growing challenge facing enterprises: AI agents are increasingly being granted access to critical systems, data, and workflows, while existing security tools lack visibility into what those agents actually do once deployed. Traditional security tools can monitor users, endpoints, or prompts, but often lack visibility into how agents behave once they begin taking actions on their own.

As organizations move beyond chatbots and begin deploying autonomous agents capable of writing code, accessing databases, interacting with applications, and making decisions on their own, security teams are struggling to monitor and control these new machine identities in real time.

"AI agents may be the biggest productivity unlock enterprises have seen in decades, which is why organizations are moving so quickly to deploy them," said Barak Sternberg, co-founder and CEO of Tenet Security. "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."

Before launching Tenet, Sternberg and Poran helped build Cisco's AI Defense and led some of the company's early work on threats targeting autonomous AI systems. Prior to Cisco, the pair founded Wild Pointer, a cybersecurity company that served Fortune 500 customers and scaled to a seven-figure annual revenue business. Both founders are speakers at major security conferences, including DEF CON and Black Hat.

As enterprises rushed to deploy AI agents, Sternberg and Poran became convinced that existing security tools were largely blind to what those agents actually do once they're put to work. The founders concluded that the industry's biggest AI security challenge would not be protecting models, but controlling what autonomous agents do after they are granted access to real systems, data, and workflows.

That conviction ultimately led them to leave and launch Tenet Security.

Tenet's goal is to help enterprises deploy autonomous agents at scale without introducing unmanaged security risk, giving security teams greater confidence to support AI adoption across the organization. Its platform is focused on securing AI agents at runtime and is designed to prevent threats, including unauthorized access, data exfiltration, agent manipulation, and what the company calls "Agentjacking,” where malicious instructions embedded in emails, logs, documents, databases, or other data sources can adversely change an agent's behavior with potentially catastrophic effects. Unlike traditional security tools that generate alerts after suspicious activity occurs, Tenet is designed to intervene before an agent's action is executed.

The company's launch follows research from Tenet Threat Labs demonstrating Agentjacking, a new class of attack that manipulates AI agents into executing attacker-controlled actions. In testing, the research team validated the technique across more than 100 enterprise environments and found thousands of organizations potentially exposed through publicly accessible attack paths. According to Tenet, the technique operated without triggering traditional security controls because the agents were acting within their authorized permissions.

Tenet says early deployments have already demonstrated the operational challenges organizations face as AI agent usage expands. One $1 billion ARR legal-sector enterprise increased its use of AI agents from two deployments to more than twenty over a six-month period while using Tenet's platform. According to the company, more than ten attempted attacks, including a critical XSS attack, were detected and blocked during that period. In another Fortune 1000 enterprise deployment, Tenet identified a runaway AI agent generating tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary token consumption over a single weekend before it could be scaled more broadly.

“We're increasingly seeing AI agents become part of the attack path itself," said Nevo Poran, co-founder and CTO of Tenet Security. "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,” Poran added.

The funding will support continued product development, 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.

Tenet enters the market as enterprise adoption of autonomous AI agents accelerates. According to the company, organizations have as many as 5x more AI agents running than security teams realize, creating visibility and governance challenges that traditional security controls were not designed to address.

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; Lior Tal, former CEO of Coralogix; and other cybersecurity and enterprise technology leaders.

Tenet Security is headquartered in North America and works with enterprises deploying AI agents across development, operations, and business workflows.

About Tenet Security
Tenet Security is the security platform for the agentic layer. The company helps enterprises discover, assess, and protect autonomous AI agents operating across their environments. Founded by veteran offensive security researchers Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran, Tenet enables organizations to deploy AI agents at scale by providing visibility, runtime protection, and threat prevention for agent-driven workflows.