Cybersecurity startup Tenzai has emerged from stealth with $75 million in seed funding, one of the largest early-stage rounds reported in the sector.
Tel Aviv, Israel based Tenzai has developed an AI-driven platform for penetration testing, which it says can continuously identify and address software vulnerabilities. The company aims to automate a process that has traditionally been manual and infrequent, a gap that has grown as software development accelerates with the use of AI-generated code and frequent production updates.
The company was founded by a group of cybersecurity veterans: Pavel Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal, and Aner Mazur. Gurvich and Zeitlin previously co-founded Guardicore, which was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2021 for $600 million. Mazur was formerly chief product officer at developer security firm Snyk.
Tenzai says it is already piloting its platform with large organizations in the financial services, healthcare, and technology industries.
“Pentesting hasn’t changed much since I was a pentester in high school some 25 years ago,” said Gurvich. “Back then the work was episodic and manual. Today, AI allows us to bring elite, nation-grade offensive capabilities at a scale and speed that were previously impossible. In large enterprises with hundreds of applications that change daily, providing real security assurance is only possible with autonomous AI that can find and fix vulnerabilities at enterprise scale.
The funding was led by Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, and Lux Capital, with additional participation from Swish Ventures and several individual investors. The additional cash will be used to expand its research and security teams and to support growth in North America and Europe.
