Tenzai

Tenzai is an AI-native cybersecurity company that has developed a platform for autonomous penetration testing. Founded in May 2025, the company's system uses agentic AI to continuously and autonomously hack, exploit, and remediate vulnerabilities in enterprise software, offering a scalable, always-on alternative to traditional manual and episodic penetration testing. The platform is designed to address the security gaps created by the rapid pace of modern software development, where a significant portion of new code is AI-generated and deployed multiple times a day.

The Tel Aviv-based startup was founded by a team of cybersecurity veterans with experience from elite Israeli military intelligence units: Pavel Gurvich (CEO), Ariel Zeitlin (CTO), Ofri Ziv (VP Research), Itamar Tal (VP Engineering), and Aner Mazur (Chief Product Officer). Most of the founding team previously co-founded Guardicore, a cybersecurity company acquired by Akamai in 2021 for approximately $600 million, while Mazur was the founding CPO at Snyk. This collective experience in building and scaling security companies, along with their expertise in offensive cyber operations, informed the creation of Tenzai.

Tenzai emerged from stealth in November 2025 with a $75 million seed funding round, one of the largest in the cybersecurity sector. The round was led by Greylock Partners, Lux Capital, and Battery Ventures, with participation from other investors. The company operates in the multi-billion dollar penetration testing market, aiming to disrupt the reliance on human consultants by offering a software-based solution. Its business model targets large enterprises, particularly in the financial services, healthcare, and technology sectors, where it is already running early deployments. The platform is built on frontier AI models and provides full explainability and governance, allowing human operators to assess and approve its suggested fixes.

Keywords: autonomous penetration testing, agentic AI, cybersecurity, vulnerability remediation, offensive security, AI-generated code, continuous security testing, enterprise software security, application security, AI hacker, vulnerability management, Guardicore, automated hacking, software security, exploit detection