Founded in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, and currently based in the United States, Tenet is focused on identifying and halting risky AI agent behavior as it happens.
TenetSecurity.ai was established by Barak Sternberg (CEO) and Nevo Poran (CTO). The pair share a strong professional background: they previously co-founded Cisco’s AI Defense research division and are both graduates of Israel’s elite Unit 8200 intelligence unit. The seed funding round is spearheaded by the Westly Group, known for early investments in companies like Tesla, SentinelOne, and Lumina.
The company has developed a proprietary, patent-pending system built to block harmful actions by rogue AI agents—whether they’ve gone off the rails on their own or been taken over by attackers. Once deployed within a network, these agents often operate undetected, with their activities only becoming visible after damage has already occurred.
“AI agents represent perhaps the greatest productivity leap for businesses in decades, which explains why companies are rushing to adopt them,” notes Sternberg. “But we’re now in an era where autonomous agents interact with systems, data, and other agents in ways that most existing security solutions weren’t built to monitor. This introduces a completely new layer of risk that demands a fundamentally different defense strategy.”
Tenet’s mission is to help organizations harness the power of AI agents safely—without falling victim to unpredictable or uncontrolled behaviors that emerge during operation. External attackers can also exploit agents by corrupting the data they rely on, a tactic Tenet refers to as ‘agentjacking’.
The risk is amplified by how fast these agents act; by the time security teams notice something wrong, it’s often too late. To keep pace, Tenet employs its own AI-driven agent that matches the speed of others. It uses a lightweight runtime sensor that simultaneously monitors operating system activity, network and API calls, and the agent’s underlying LLM reasoning. According to Tenet, companies may be running up to five times more AI agents than their security teams are aware of. While defenders might not grasp the full scope of the threat, Tenet’s platform provides complete visibility into all agent behavior.
When Tenet’s sensor detects a potentially dangerous action, it simulates and forecasts the agent’s next step before it executes. If the action is deemed harmful, it’s blocked in real time. This isn’t based on static rules—it’s a dynamic, context-aware response grounded in the principle that stopping a threat before it occurs is far more effective than dealing with its aftermath.
The danger posed by malicious ‘agentjacking’—which can cause more damage than simple agent errors—has been confirmed by research from Tenet’s internal Threat Labs. “Our team tested this technique across over 100 enterprise environments and discovered thousands of organizations potentially vulnerable through publicly accessible attack vectors,” the company reports. This method bypasses conventional security controls because the agents operate within their granted permissions—but Tenet’s platform is designed to catch and stop them.
“We’re seeing AI agents increasingly become part of the attack chain itself,” says Poran. “Adversaries can manipulate agents to steal sensitive information, misuse privileges, or carry out actions on their behalf—all in ways traditional security tools weren’t built to detect. The real challenge isn’t just tracking prompts or API traffic; it’s understanding and controlling agent behavior in real time. The only effective place to intercept these threats is at runtime—the exact moment an agent decides to act,” he explains.
Tenet reports strong results from its early customer deployments. “One legal-sector company with $1 billion in annual recurring revenue scaled its AI agent usage from two to more than twenty deployments over six months while using Tenet’s platform. During that time, the system detected and blocked over ten attempted attacks, including a critical cross-site scripting (XSS) attempt. In another case involving a Fortune 1000 company, Tenet caught a runaway AI agent that had already racked up tens of thousands dollars in unnecessary token costs over a single weekend—before it could be rolled out more broadly.”
The newly raised seed funding will be used to accelerate product development, grow the Tenet Threat Labs team, expand go-to-market efforts across North America, and extend support to cover more emerging AI agent frameworks and enterprise environments.
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