We are excited to announce that Greylock led a $75m seed round financing at Tenzai, a cybersecurity startup focused on building the industry’s leading agentic AI penetration testing platform.
Tenzai agents actively hack, exploit, and fix the hardest-to-find vulnerabilities across enterprise software – at the speed of AI.
Tenzai is founded by cybersecurity veterans Pavel Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal, and Aner Mazur. The founders have leading industry track records, including tenures at elite military intelligence units. Pavel, Ariel, Ofri, and Itamar previously built and scaled Guardicore (acquired by Akamai), and Aner previously led product management at Snyk. We have known this exceptional team over the years, and it’s a privilege to now be in partnership together. Since founding, the Tenzai founders have attracted a very talented and experienced initial engineering team. The company is already engaged in design partnerships and early deployments with leading enterprises across financial services, healthcare and technology.
Penetration testing is an important area within cybersecurity. Most enterprises purchase some software and have a combination of in-house teams along with external partners that deliver services. For every dollar spent on software, organizations typically spend 3-5 dollars on services. There is a tremendous shortage worldwide of qualified professionals. Due to budget and technology limitations, most organizations currently test only sporadically or periodically, and not as continuously as needed to keep up with internal change. Additionally, with the advent of AI, enterprises are under attack from nation states and for-profit hackers who are leveraging AI with increasing precision and velocity.
This backdrop within the AI era is a set-up for the inevitable – an industry evolution towards AI-driven autonomous pen testing. Tenzai’s mission is to be the category-defining leader in this move with AI hackers that think like adversaries and work for the defenders. Tenzai will provide for full explainability and governance, varying levels of autonomy, security across both human and AI generated code, and bespoke capabilities for each enterprise across specific business logic. Each enterprise will have Tenzai AI software hackers that work autonomously 24×7 on the organization’s behalf, delivering the highest level of security with full understanding of context specific to the enterprise.
Greylock has a distinguished track record in cybersecurity, backing outlier founders at company inception. We are excited to partner with the Tenzai team, to help build towards a secure future for all enterprises. Meet your AI hacker.
