Tenzai

Tenzai was founded in 2025 in Tel Aviv by five cybersecurity veterans: Pavel Gurvich (CEO), Ariel Zeitlin (CTO), Ofri Ziv (Co-founder, Research), Itamar Tal (Co-founder, Platform/R&D), and Aner Mazur (Co-founder, Product). Per Greylock's own announcement, the founders have backgrounds in elite Israeli military intelligence units, and four of them — Gurvich, Zeitlin, Ziv, and Tal — previously built and scaled Guardicore, a microsegmentation/data-center security company that was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2021. Aner Mazur previously led product management at Snyk. This 'serial founder' pedigree (well-known, successful security entrepreneurs backed again by their prior investors/relationships) was repeatedly cited by press as a key reason for the unusually large seed round.

On November 11, 2025, Tenzai announced it had raised $75 million in seed funding, which multiple outlets (Forbes, SecurityWeek, Pulse 2.0, BankInfoSecurity, Ynetnews, Jerusalem Post, FinTech Global, Calcalist) described as a record or near-record seed round for the cybersecurity industry. Greylock Partners led the round; Battery Ventures and Lux Capital are also named as major/backing investors on Tenzai's own site, with Swish Ventures, Jibe Ventures, and unnamed 'strategic operators and angels' listed as additional participants. Greylock's announcement post (published by partner Asheem Chandna, dated Nov 9-10, 2025 on Greylock's blog, with the public press release dated Nov 11, 2025) states Greylock 'led a $75m seed round financing at Tenzai.' Tenzai's own investor/board page states the round was 'backed by world-class investors Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, and Lux Capital, with Asheem Chandna (Greylock) and Scott Tobin (Battery) on the board.' No valuation figure has been publicly disclosed for this round as of this research. No subsequent (e.g., Series A) round had been announced as of August 2026 based on available news coverage.

Product-wise, Tenzai's platform ('AI Hacker') performs full, continuous, agentic penetration tests — discovering attack surface, chaining individually low-severity findings into high-impact exploit paths (e.g., a documented case study chaining five low-severity findings into a full exploit), and producing reproducible, evidence-backed exploits with remediation guidance. In March 2026, Tenzai announced its AI Hacker ranked in the top 1% across six global capture-the-flag (CTF) hacking platforms (websec.fr, hack.arrrg.de, websec.co.il, Lakera Gandalf, pwnable.tw, and dreamhack.io), outperforming more than 99% of the roughly 125,000 human participants — widely covered by Axios ('Future of Cybersecurity'), SecurityBrief, and Forbes. In June 2026, Tenzai expanded its platform to test AI application surfaces (chaining findings across web, API, and AI/agentic surfaces). In July-August 2026, Tenzai announced a formal partnership with system integrator AHEAD, a collaboration with Palo Alto Networks aimed at network security ('Fighting AI with AI'), and a capability to autonomously deploy Web Application Firewall (WAF) mitigations (via platforms including AWS WAF and Akamai) immediately upon validating an exploit, closing the loop from discovery to defense.

Business model

B2B SaaS / agentic-AI-as-a-service cybersecurity platform sold to enterprises, delivered as a continuous, subscription-based alternative (or complement) to traditional manual penetration testing services and vulnerability scanners.

Enterprise subscription / platform licensing (exact pricing not publicly disclosed); also positions itself as an alternative to per-engagement pentest services and system-integrator delivered pentesting (e.g., via partners such as AHEAD).