Former Cisco Researchers Launch Tenet Security, Raise $6M to Secure AI Agents from Attacks

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)--June 17, 2026-- 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. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260617711939/en/ 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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260617711939/en/ Media Contact Hannah Sather [email protected] Deb Montner [email protected] Montner Tech PR

Ex-Cisco researchers launch Tenet Security to lock down rogue AI agents

Ex-Cisco researchers launch Tenet Security to lock down rogue AI agents Former Cisco artificial intelligence security researchers have launched a new company to tackle a problem that barely existed a year ago: securing the autonomous AI agents enterprises are handing the keys to their most critical systems. Tenet Security Inc. today formally launched a platform designed to stop malicious AI agent behavior before it reaches production systems. Its core technology, called Agent-Side Simulation, simulates an agent's likely next moves before they hit live infrastructure. If a path looks risky, Tenet intervenes before damage occurs and ships a trace explaining why the action was blocked. Most security tools raise an alarm after something suspicious has already happened. Tenet tries to catch the problem first, before the agent actually does anything. Companies are giving AI agents real power to act on their own. The agents run code, pull from databases and make changes to live systems. The catch is that once an agent is loose in the environment, security teams mostly cannot tell what it's doing. Tenet says organizations often have as many as five times more AI agents operating than their security teams realize. "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 co-founder and Chief Executive Barak Sternberg. "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." Sternberg founded Tenet with Nevo Poran. Both are offensive security researchers who worked on Cisco's AI Defense and studied how attackers go after autonomous systems. Earlier they ran Wild Pointer, a cybersecurity company that reached seven-figure annual revenue with Fortune 500 customers on its books. Sternberg and Poran have each spoken at DEF CON and Black Hat. The launch follows research from the company's Tenet Threat Labs into what it calls "agentjacking," a class of attack that manipulates agents into executing attacker-controlled actions. The attack hides a malicious instruction inside something the agent reads, maybe an email, a log entry, or a record in a database. When the agent gets to it, the instruction takes over and redirects what the agent does next. T enet says it tested this across more than 100 enterprise environments and found thousands of organizations that could be hit. Traditional security tools missed it. The agents were doing what they were allowed to do, so nothing tripped an alarm. Early deployments point to the scale of the problem. Tenet says one legal-sector enterprise with $1 billion in annual recurring revenue grew from two agent deployments to more than 20 over six months while using the platform, which blocked more than 10 attempted attacks, including a critical cross-site scripting attempt. At a separate Fortune 1000 customer, Tenet flagged a runaway agent burning tens of thousands of dollars in token consumption over a single weekend. "We're increasingly seeing AI agents become part of the attack path itself," Poran said. "The only place left to catch these threats is at runtime, in the moment an agent decides to act." The launch was backed by $6 million in seed funding to support product development, expansion of Tenet Threat Labs and growth of the company's North American go-to-market operations. The Westly Group, an early backer of SentinelOne Holdings Inc., led the round with participation from MizMaa Ventures Ltd. Tenet's advisers include David Schwed, former chief information security officer at Robinhood Markets Inc., and Rick Scott, former CISO at The Bank of New York Mellon Corp.