WILMINGTON, DE — Tenet Security has emerged from stealth with $6 million in seed funding to develop cybersecurity tools designed to monitor and control autonomous AI agents, targeting what the company’s founders view as a growing security gap as enterprises deploy artificial intelligence systems with direct access to business applications and data.
The funding round was led by The Westly Group and MizMaa Ventures and will be used to expand product development, threat research and go-to-market operations across North America.
The launch comes as businesses move beyond generative AI chatbots and increasingly deploy autonomous software agents capable of accessing databases, writing code, interacting with applications and performing tasks with limited human oversight.
That shift has created new challenges for security teams, which have traditionally focused on securing users, devices and networks rather than autonomous software entities operating inside enterprise environments.
Tenet was founded by cybersecurity researchers Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran, who previously helped build AI security initiatives at Cisco and earlier co-founded cybersecurity company Wild Pointer.
The company’s platform is built around what it calls Agent-side Simulation, a technology designed to predict and analyze an AI agent’s intended actions before those actions are executed against production systems.
If potentially harmful behavior is identified, the platform can block the action before execution and provide an explanation of the decision.
“AI agents may be the biggest productivity unlock enterprises have seen in decades,” Sternberg stated. “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.”
The company is focusing on threats that emerge after AI agents are granted access to enterprise systems, including unauthorized data access, privilege misuse, data exfiltration and manipulation of agent behavior.
Tenet has also published research describing a technique it calls “Agentjacking,” which involves embedding malicious instructions into data sources that AI agents may later access and interpret as legitimate commands.
According to the company, testing of the technique across more than 100 enterprise environments identified thousands of organizations that could potentially be exposed through publicly accessible attack paths.
Poran argued that traditional security controls often fail to detect such attacks because AI agents operate within authorized permissions.
“The challenge isn’t simply monitoring prompts or API traffic, but understanding and controlling agent behavior in real time,” Poran stated. “The only place left to catch these threats is at runtime, in the moment an agent decides to act.”
The company cited early customer deployments as evidence of growing operational risks tied to AI adoption.
In one deployment, Tenet reported detecting and blocking more than 10 attempted attacks, including a cross-site scripting attack, while another deployment identified an AI agent that generated tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary computing costs over a single weekend.
Tenet enters a rapidly expanding market as enterprises accelerate deployment of autonomous AI systems and cybersecurity vendors race to develop tools capable of governing and securing those environments.
The company is headquartered in North America and focuses on enterprises deploying AI agents across software development, operations and business workflows.
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