Tenzai nets $75M seed to scale agentic AI pentesting globally fast

Tenzai, an Israeli start-up building autonomous offensive security, has emerged from stealth with a $75 million seed round to commercialise an agentic AI platform that actively probes, exploits and helps remediate the most elusive software vulnerabilities.

The round was led by Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures and Lux Capital, with additional participation from other strategic backers. The funding will accelerate R&D, expand the company’s security and AI research teams, and fund commercial roll-out across North America and Europe, where demand for continuous testing tools is rising.

Founding the business are veterans of enterprise security: Pavel Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal and Aner Mazur. Several members of the team previously built Guardicore, a microsegmentation vendor that was bought by Akamai in 2021 for about $600 million, and others come from product leadership roles at developer-security firms such as Snyk. That collective background underpins Tenzai’s focus on offensive engineering and large-scale automation.

Tenzai pitches itself at the intersection of two fast-moving trends: the rising use of AI in software development and the shift to near-continuous delivery pipelines. Industry surveys estimate that roughly 30% of newly written code is AI-assisted, while many enterprises deploy code multiple times per day. Traditional penetration tests are episodic and human-led, leaving wide windows where production code runs untested. Tenzai’s approach is to deliver "always-on" offensive coverage: AI agents that emulate real attack chains, validate exploitability and then feed fixes back to engineering teams.

Early deployments are already underway with customers in financial services, healthcare and large technology firms. The company says its platform reduces time-to-detect for complex logic and chaining flaws and can scale across hundreds of applications — a capability investors flagged as crucial given the expanded attack surface from AI-generated code and microservices architectures.

The global cybersecurity market is forecast to exceed $200 billion within the next couple of years, and enterprise demand for automated security tools is one of the fastest-growing segments. By baking offensive capabilities into development workflows, Tenzai aims to convert security from a periodic compliance check into a continuous engineering practice — a pivot with implications for security teams, regulators and DevOps organisations alike.

With $75M in fresh capital and a team with proven exits and offensive experience, Tenzai is positioning itself to be one of the earlier vendors offering agentic penetration testing at scale. The company plans to hire across engineering and customer success, deepen its AI research, and expand European commercial operations over the next 12 months.