AI Security Startup Tenet Emerges From Stealth With $6M to Protect AI Agents

Securing the Invisible Workforce

Enterprises are handing AI agents the keys to their most critical systems. Code repositories, databases, APIs, cloud environments, and business workflows are all fair game. But according to Tenet Security, a new startup emerging from stealth today, most security teams have no idea what those agents actually do once they are turned loose. The company has raised $6 million in seed funding led by The Westly Group and MizMaa Ventures to solve exactly that problem. The message is clear: the agentic revolution needs a security layer, and it needs it now.

"AI agents may be the biggest productivity unlock enterprises have seen in decades, which is why organizations are moving so quickly to deploy them. 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." – Barak Sternberg, co-founder and CEO of Tenet Security

Agentjacking and the New Attack Surface

The founders, Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran, previously built Cisco's AI Defense and led early research on autonomous agent threats. They are now warning about a class of attack they call "Agentjacking". The technique hides malicious instructions in emails, logs, documents, or databases that the agent reads. When the agent processes the poisoned data, it executes attacker-controlled actions—and traditional security tools miss it entirely because the agent is acting within its authorized permissions. The research team validated the technique across more than 100 enterprise environments and found thousands of organizations potentially exposed through publicly accessible attack paths.

Tenet's platform uses a lightweight runtime sensor that monitors operating system activity, network and API calls, and the agent's LLM reasoning simultaneously. The key differentiator is Agent-Side Simulation, which predicts and simulates an agent's likely next actions before they execute against production systems. If a path appears risky, the system intervenes before damage occurs. The SiliconANGLE coverage of the launch notes that organizations often have as many as five times more AI agents running than security teams realize.

The Growing AI Security Market

Tenet enters a rapidly expanding market. According to Dell'Oro Group, the emerging AI Systems Security market is forecast to grow from essentially zero to nearly $8 billion by 2030, with nearly 60 vendors already competing in areas including model security, validation, red teaming, and agent security. The broader enterprise AI systems spending base is expected to reach nearly $400 billion by 2030, underscoring that security demand is tied to real-world AI adoption rather than just cloud spending].

Early deployments have already demonstrated the operational challenges organizations face. At one $1 billion ARR legal-sector enterprise that scaled from two agents to more than 20 over six months, Tenet blocked more than ten attempted attacks, including a critical XSS attack . At a Fortune 1000 customer, Tenet identified a runaway AI agent generating tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary token consumption over a single weekend.