With $250M in fresh capital and 100 employees, Tenex is betting it can outrun CrowdStrike by building its security AI from scratch rather than bolting it onto existing tools. The numbers sound bold — but they have not been independently verified.
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Tenex, a Sarasota-based cybersecurity startup, has raised $250 million in Series B funding at a $1 billion-plus valuation, positioning itself as an AI-native alternative to traditional managed detection and response (MDR) vendors that merely bolt AI onto legacy architectures. The company claims its ground-up ML approach enables sub-minute threat detection and response, with self-reported 318% year-over-year revenue growth. The fundraise aligns with a broader trend of AI-native security startups commanding premium valuations, following similar rounds by Xbow and acquisitions like OpenAI's purchase of Promptfoo.
Tenex, a Sarasota-based cybersecurity startup, has closed a $250 million Series B round at a valuation north of $1 billion, the company said Tuesday — per Bloomberg, which first reported the news. The round was led by Crosspoint Capital Partners, with participation from Shield Capital and DeepWork Capital — and brings the company's total raised to roughly $277 million, counting a $27 million Series A last September. For context: that's roughly $2.5 million raised per employee.
The company sells what it calls an AI-native managed detection and response service — meaning it built its system from the ground up around machine learning rather than bolting AI features onto existing security infrastructure. "Most of the managed detection and response market is still trying to bolt AI onto architectures that were never designed for it," Zach Sivertson, a managing director at Crosspoint, said in a statement. "Tenex went back to first principles and built natively — and the growth shows what that difference means in the market." The company claims its platform can detect and respond to threats in under a minute, and says its revenue has grown 318 percent year-over-year — figures that are self-reported and haven't been independently audited, per the Business Observer.
The team behind Tenex comes largely from the legacy cybersecurity world. Eric Foster, the CEO, previously co-founded Cyderes alongside Gary Fish at Fishtech Group and served as president. Venkata Koppaka, the chief technology officer, was a founding engineer at Chronicle — which became Google Cloud Security Operations — where he led work on user entity behavior analytics and alert management. Bashar Abouseido, recently appointed president, spent more than two decades in enterprise security leadership, most recently as chief security officer at Charles Schwab. Greg Clark, a former CEO of Symantec who now runs Crosspoint Capital, has backed Tenex through both rounds — the Series A last September and this week's Series B, six months apart.
The fundraise fits a pattern in AI security tooling that has accelerated since the start of the year. Xbow, another AI-native security startup, raised $120 million and crossed $1 billion in valuation on March 18. OpenAI acquired Promptfoo, a company that helps enterprises find and fix vulnerabilities in AI models during development, in early March. Tenex is a Google partner and also works with Microsoft and Amazon, according to its description of cloud partnerships.
Whether Tenex's specific claims hold up against the category's incumbents is an open question. Managed detection and response (MDR) is a crowded market. CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and a long tail of specialized firms all sell variations of the same thing, and most have spent the past two years adding AI features to existing platforms. Tenex's 100-person headcount and stated ambition to reach 300 employees by the end of 2026 suggests it's still in early build-out mode. The growth figures and response-time claims are Tenex's own; there is no independent audit or third-party benchmark cited in the company's statements. The $250 million gives it room to hire and expand — but it also sets a valuation that demands the numbers keep accelerating.
The investor thesis — that AI-native architecture is meaningfully different from retrofitted AI — has a plausible technical argument behind it. Security systems designed from scratch to use machine learning can incorporate model drift detection, autonomous investigation, and agentic orchestration as core features rather than layers added on top of existing alert pipelines. Whether that distinction matters enough to win enterprise contracts at scale against vendors with far larger salesforces and brand recognition is the question Tenex's new valuation is implicitly betting on.
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Research completed — 0 sources registered. Tenex.ai raised $250M Series B at $1B+ valuation. Second $100M+ AI security round in two weeks (Xbow hit unicorn March 18 with $120M; OpenAI bought Pr
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