TENEX.AI partners to deliver Google Cloud’s new autonomous, continuous security platform at enterprise scale

SARASOTA, FL — May 27, 2026: TENEX.AI, the AI-native, human-led Agentic SOC company, today announced its expanded partnership with Google Cloud to deliver Google AI Threat Defense, a newly announced automated security system designed to continuously monitor for and outpace AI-driven attacks.

Announced today, Google AI Threat Defense fuses the reasoning power of Gemini and other frontier models, the contextual risk prioritization of Wiz, the code remediation capabilities of CodeMender, and the frontline expertise of Mandiant, operationalized through a four-step framework: Prepare, Scan and Prioritize, Remediate, and Monitor.

This announcement arrives as AI-driven attacks can exploit vulnerabilities at unprecedented speeds, outpacing security teams’ ability to prevent them. Google Cloud is delivering AI Threat Defense to help organizations outpace AI-enabled adversaries and stop threats before impact. 

TENEX.AI’s role is to help operationalize and deliver this new architecture inside enterprise customer environments, turning autonomous platform capabilities into verified, remediated code integrated continuously with a real-time, AI-native, human-powered SOC.

“Every CISO I talk to is being asked the same question by their board: how will the security team keep up when adversaries become autonomous? Google AI Threat Defense gives them a credible answer at the platform layer; TENEX gives them the delivery model that turns it into measurable outcomes. That is the combination enterprises are asking for, and it is a core thesis behind our investment in TENEX.” — Greg Clark, Founder & Managing Partner, Crosspoint Capital Partners

What Google AI Threat Defense Delivers

Google’s new AI Threat Defense delivers:

• Mapping the attack surface across multicloud, multi-AI, code, SaaS, and hybrid environments via Wiz
• Deep vulnerability hunting through AI security agents (including CodeMender) drawing on multiple frontier models via the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
• Exploitability validation by enriching findings with live architectural and runtime context, filtering theoretical flaws down to reachable, business-critical risk
• Autonomous remediation at machine speed, generating, testing, and applying patches directly in developer IDE/CLI workflows and across live production environments
• Continuous monitoring through Google Security Operations SOC capabilities and Wiz’s agents

The full announcement is available at the Google Cloud blog.

TENEX.AI’s Role: Turning the Platform into an Outcome

Most enterprise security organizations, particularly in regulated industries, lack the engineering bandwidth to translate these new AI-driven capabilities into measurable risk reduction. TENEX.AI is built to close that gap.

To support Google AI Threat Defense, TENEX.AI has built a dedicated delivery offering for the platform,  available as a standalone service for any enterprise, as well as through TENEX.AI’s AI-native, human-led SOC, and MDR service offerings where customers need a fully integrated and unified AI security workflow.

As a Google AI Threat Defense partner, the TENEX.AI offering includes:

• Rapid validation engagements to demonstrate for customers what Google AI Threat Defense will actually deliver against their specific codebase, infrastructure, and threat model: measured outcomes, not slideware.
• Direct TENEX.AI AI-driven SOC and MDR integration into Google AI Threat Defense to feed verified, exploitable findings as enriched application telemetry directly into Google Security Operations playbooks from TENEX.AI’s automated triage agents, surfacing AI-detected, code-level risk in the same workflow as runtime detection, not in a separate ticket queue.
• High-fidelity, exploitability-validated triage with elite human analysts on the loop to funnel the large volume of model findings down to verified, reachable, exploitable flaws – eliminating the false-positive overhead that has historically kept AppSec tooling off engineering roadmaps.
• TENEX.AI-engineered drafts and patches, using deep, AI-driven structural code context, shipped alongside customer engineering teams to fulfill customers’ workload-side obligations under the Google Cloud Shared Fate Model.
• Custom data-boundary maps for proprietary middleware. TENEX.AI creates bespoke architectural maps for in-house and proprietary middleware that commercial scanners typically miss, helping ensure AI Threat Defense covers the code that is uniquely yours and is uniquely prioritized.

“AI Threat Defense gives enterprises a real shot at outpacing AI-driven adversaries – but a platform isn’t an outcome, and most security organizations don’t have the engineering bandwidth to bridge that gap on their own. That’s the work TENEX is built for: showing customers proof of value on their own code and infrastructure, triaging findings down to verified, exploitable risk, drafting and shipping patches alongside engineering teams, and closing the loop back into our MDR so code-level risk surfaces in the same workflow as runtime detection.” — Eric Foster, Founder & CEO, TENEX.AI

“Legacy MDR was built around a human-speed model of security operations with alerts, escalations, investigations, and response queues. AI is changing the pace of the threat landscape faster than most organizations can adapt. The next generation of cybersecurity will come from combining autonomous security platforms with an MDR built around AI from the start. That’s what Google AI Threat Defense and TENEX bring together for enterprise customers, and it’s why I’m proud to chair this company.“ — Elias “Lou” Manousos, Chairman, TENEX.AI

About TENEX.AI

TENEX.AI: The AI SOC Company. The AI-native, human-led AI SOC and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider led by operators who’ve built and scaled MDR before, with founding engineers from the hyperscalers and leading AI labs. Recently named the #1 fastest-growing cybersecurity company in the country by IT-Harvest’s 2026 Cyber 150, TENEX.AI serves enterprise customers across Google and Microsoft security ecosystems. TENEX.AI’s platform triages, investigates, hunts, and responds to threats autonomously, with elite human analysts always in the loop, combining the speed and scalability of AI with the accountability of human-led security operations. Backed by Crosspoint Capital Partners, Shield Capital, DTCP, Deepwork Capital, and the Florida Opportunity Fund, with its seed round led in 2025 by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), TENEX.AI is headquartered in Sarasota, FL with offices in Overland Park, San Jose, and Phoenix. Learn more at TENEX.ai.

Media Contact TENEX.AI Press Team press@TENEX.ai

AI-native. Human-led.

Because one without the other isn’t enough

A year ago, we asked ourselves a question that had nothing to do with product roadmaps or pipeline metrics. We asked: how do you tell the story of the people who chose the hardest, most thankless job in technology and why that story matters more right now than it ever has?

The answer is a short film called It’s Time to Protect

Today we’re releasing it, produced by Big Think, the same team behind Andreessen Horowitz’s iconic “It’s Time to Build” video that became a rallying cry for an entire generation of builders. We didn’t partner with Big Think to make a product demo or a sizzle reel. We partnered with them to make a statement about what we believe and who we believe in.

 

The People Nobody Talked About

Cybercrime isn’t just growing, it’s compounding and that’s not hyperbole, it’s math. Attackers scale with automation while defenders scale with exhaustion.

Right now, a Security Operations Analyst is staring at a queue of 10,000 alerts, knowing it’s humanly impossible to get through them all. The best security talent in the world spends 80% of their time on work machines could be doing, and by the time something real surfaces, they’re too depleted to respond the way they trained to, the way they want to.

I have watched this for over 30 years. As a CISO, as a builder and as someone who has sat across the table from people who chose this profession because they wanted to protect others. I watched the industry slowly grind that purpose out of them.

That’s the structural problem and it’s the one TENEX was built to fix.

 

What the Door Actually Opened

When we announced our Series B, I said something that I meant more than anything I’ve ever said publicly: AI has opened the door to the best work humans have ever done.

People heard that and some of them probably thought it was a tagline. It is not.  It is the thesis this entire company is built on.

The anxiety around AI is real and I understand it. Teachers watch students shortcut their thinking. Workers watch processes get automated overnight. Fear fills the vacuum when change moves fast and the benefits stay abstract. But anxiety isn’t analysis and in cybersecurity, where I’ve spent my career, the picture is becoming unmistakably clear.

AI didn’t come for the defenders’ jobs. It came for the parts of their jobs that were exhausting them.

When AI handles the volume — 100% of alerts, triaged in under a minute — humans don’t become optional, they become exceptional. They stop drowning in noise and start doing the work they actually trained for. They bring their instincts, their experience, their adversarial judgment to the threats that matter. That’s not a smaller role, that’s the largest role a defender has ever had.

Its Time To Protect tells that story. What happens when you finally give defenders real leverage. When the smartest people in cybersecurity get to do the work they were meant to do. When 100% of alerts get analyzed and not the 10% that a human team can reach before burnout takes over.

 

Why “It’s Time to Protect”

Cybersecurity is at the same inflection point right now. Not a disruption — an inflection. The difference matters. Disruption implies something is being broken. Inflection means the trajectory is changing and the teams who understand that change will build something the others can’t catch up to.

This industry has spent decades reacting. Managing. Coping. Pouring good people into a structure that was designed to lose slowly. We raised $250 million and we’re hiring 250+ people — not despite the AI era, but because of it. Because the better your AI gets, the more you need exceptional humans to push it, challenge it and make it sharper. AI without human intelligence isn’t security, it is just automation.

It’s time to stop coping and start protecting, with the conviction, the technology, and the people to actually turn the tide.

 

This Is Personal

I built TENEX because I believe we are living through the first moment in history where defenders can actually take ground from the enemy. Where the math finally works in our favor. Where the people who chose this fight,  who wake up every day to protect strangers’ data, infrastructure and digital lives — finally get tools worthy of what they do.

The people joining TENEX today are not a footnote in our AI story. They are our story. Every analyst, every engineer, every threat hunter who walks through our door is proof that the bar didn’t go away when AI arrived, it went up. We are looking for the people who see that as the opportunity of a lifetime, not a threat.

AI-native. Human-led. Because one without the other isn’t enough.

It’s time to protect. Here. Now.

 

By Eric Foster, CEO, TENEX.AI

TENEX.ai is an AI-native, human led managed detection and response company. Human-led. AI-first. Learn more at TENEX.ai.

And Why the Future of Global Cybersecurity Is Being Rewritten Right Now

After more than 20 years building and scaling cybersecurity businesses across EMEA and international markets, Piers Morgan has learned to recognize inflection points. He has seen vendors promise transformation and deliver iteration. He has watched AI get bolted onto legacy platforms and rebranded as innovation. He has helped organizations navigate the gap between what the market sells and what actually works in the field.

TENEX is different. That’s not a pitch. It’s why he’s there.

 

The Market Has Hit a Structural Ceiling

Across Europe, the Middle East, and global enterprise markets, demand for managed detection and response has never been stronger. But service providers and security teams are running into hard limits. Analysts are drowning in alert volume. Skilled talent is scarce and expensive. Traditional SOC models don’t scale profitably. And the AI many vendors are shipping? It is automation layered on top of workflows that were already broken.

The result is a market growing in demand but constrained in execution. The organizations that should be most protected are the ones most exposed, not because they haven’t invested, but because the tools they’ve invested in weren’t built for the scale of the problem. EMEA organizations are sophisticated and demanding. They don’t need another vendor. They need a partner who understands their regulatory environment, their threat surface, and the pressure their security teams are under. TENEX.ai breaks that ceiling.

 

AI-Native from Day One, Not Day One Thousand

The most important thing to understand about TENEX is the architecture decision that came first: this platform was built AI-native from the ground up. Not a legacy SOC tool with automation layered on later. Not a “powered by AI” badge on an existing product. Born with it. That design choice changes everything, especially for MSPs and MSSPs trying to deliver managed security at scale.

TENEX handles 100% of alerts, nothing gets missed, nothing gets deprioritized because a human ran out of hours. It triages 85% automatically, reduces false positives by 98%, and delivers a mean time to respond of under one minute. And it does all of this while integrating seamlessly across the endpoint, network, cloud, identity, and SIEM tooling customers have already invested in.

For MSPs and MSSPs, this fundamentally changes the economics of managed security. Instead of scaling by adding headcount, they scale customers, regions, and service lines without linear cost growth, and with better outcomes.

“This is not about selling another tool. It is about redefining how security is delivered and EMEA is ready for that conversation. Organizations there are sophisticated, demanding and tired of solutions that don’t scale with the complexity they face every day. TENEX changes that equation.”
— Piers Morgan, Head of EMEA, TENEX.ai

This Is an Inflection Point Worth Joining

TENEX.ai recently published a piece, “AI Just Opened the Door to the Best Work Humans Have Ever Done,” that articulates something Piers has believed for a long time: the conversation around AI in cybersecurity is being driven by fear when it should be driven by precision. AI doesn’t replace elite security analysts. It protects their judgment by eliminating the noise that was burying it.

That’s not a tagline. It’s an architectural reality. And it’s why the people TENEX hires, and the way it invests in its team, matters as much as the technology itself.

The organizations that will lead the next decade of cybersecurity aren’t the ones who feared AI the least. They’re the ones who understood it the earliest and built around that understanding. Piers is at TENEX because he believes it is one of those organizations.

Tenex.ai is an AI-Native, Human-Led managed detection and response company. Learn more at Tenex.AI .

Scaling Our Vision for Customer Success

Ryan Swigler has a simple philosophy about customer success: the only metric that matters is whether the customer is winning, and whether they know it.

It’s a philosophy forged over nearly two decades in SaaS, including almost nine years at Okta where Ryan rose to Vice President overseeing approximately $2 billion in annual recurring revenue and leading teams of up to 250 professionals. During that tenure, his organization consistently delivered 110%+ net retention, not because the product sold itself, but because Ryan built the systems, the culture, and the talent to make customer success a revenue engine rather than a cost center.

What makes Ryan distinctive isn’t just the scale. It’s the range. He’s a zero-to-one builder, someone who has started CS functions from scratch, designed frameworks from the ground up, and hired for potential as much as pedigree. He pioneered a Scaled Customer Success model at Okta that delivered 30% program-level ROI, proving that efficiency and intimacy aren’t mutually exclusive when the right systems are in place. He’s also someone who has operated at enterprise scale, managing global teams, complex accounts, and the kind of executive relationships that determine whether a customer renews, expands, or walks.

“The opportunity is clear: TENEX has developed a truly effective service. My responsibility is to ensure every customer recognizes this, not just through traditional metrics like dashboards and QBRs, but through tangible, board-level outcomes. This focus on verifiable results is the only measure of success.

“TENEX.ai gives us the foundation to build a customer experience where every interaction is backed by data, every outcome is measurable, and every customer knows exactly what they’re getting. That’s the CS function I’m here to build.”

— Ryan Swigler, Vice President of Customer Success, TENEX

 

What We Are Building

The playbook is straightforward but ambitious:

1. Proactive, not reactive. Customers shouldn’t have to chase us for updates. We should be surfacing insights, sharing outcomes, and identifying opportunities before they ask.
2. Measurable outcomes. Every customer should be able to point to specific, quantifiable improvements in their security posture, reduction in alert noise, faster response times, threats caught that would have been missed.
3. Human relationships at scale. AI makes our analysts more efficient. It should make our CS team more effective too by automating the routine so we can invest time in the conversations that matter.
4. Expansion through trust. The best sales motion in cybersecurity is a customer who trusts you enough to give you more. That trust is earned, not given.

At TENEX.ai, Ryan will own the end-to-end customer journey, from onboarding to enterprise-wide expansion, with a mandate to make every customer outcome undeniable. In a market where security vendors routinely overpromise and underdeliver, that mandate matters. TENEX has the platform and Ryan has the playbook, and together the goal is simple: make sure every customer is winning, and make sure they know it.

Ryan Swigler is Vice President of Customer Success at TENEX

Tenex.ai is an AI-Native, Human-Led managed detection and response company. Learn more at Tenex.AI .

And we’re putting our money — and our hiring — where our conviction is.

 

The story most people are hearing goes something like this: automation is coming for your job, machines are getting smarter and humans are becoming optional. It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also almost entirely wrong.

The anxiety is real and understandable. Teachers watch students use AI to shortcut their thinking. Workers watch legacy processes get automated overnight. Executives watch budgets get rewritten by tools that did not exist two years ago. When change moves fast and the benefits stay abstract, fear fills the vacuum. And right now, fear is driving most of the public conversation about artificial intelligence.

That’s a problem because anxiety isn’t analysis, innovation is evolution and never an end state. AI is empowering evolution but the fear and scare tactics are controlling the narrative versus the benefits it provides.

Here’s what’s actually happening, at least in cybersecurity, where we operate every day.

A modern SOC can generate thousands of alerts in a single day. Tier 1 analysts spend most of that day triaging noise. Chasing false positives. Validating signals that lead nowhere. By the time a genuinely sophisticated threat surfaces, those analysts are working through fatigue. That’s not a human failure. It’s a structural problem and no amount of hiring solves it.

TENEX handles it differently. AI processes the volume at machine speed without fatigue without recency bias from yesterday’s incident. That frees human analysts to do what only they can: think, investigate and apply the kind of contextual adversarial judgment no model has and every serious threat demands.

TENEX built an AI-native, human-led managed detection and response. AI isn’t a layer we added – it’s the foundation of everything we’ve built.

Where others saw a threat landscape growing faster than human teams could handle, TENEX saw a clear path: build AI that thinks like an elite analyst and pair it with analysts who push it further. AI-native and led by exceptional humans. Because one without the other isn’t enough.

The result is something the market hasn’t seen before. An MDR that handles 100% of alerts and triages 95%+ autonomously with sub-minute response times. But speed was never the ultimate goal. It was to give analysts their time back. To reduce the noise and the fatigue that burns good people out. To free the humans who chose this profession because they wanted to protect people to actually do that. And in doing so take a real meaningful swing at reducing cybercrime itself.

This is the real story of AI and human work. Not displacement. It’s Elevation.

 

The Smartest AI Companies Hire the Smartest Humans On Purpose

Here’s a question worth sitting with: if AI is so capable, why would an AI-native company go out of its way to hire the most incredible, experienced, deeply skilled humans in the market?

“Because AI without human intelligence isn’t security, it’s just automation.”

Being AI-native doesn’t mean humans matter less. It means you understand the relationship between human and machine intelligence deeply enough to know where each one is irreplaceable. When you’ve built AI from the ground up, you know precisely where it breaks down and you hire exceptional people to own exactly those moments.

In MDR, that means your AI handles the volume, the speed, the pattern recognition across millions of signals. But it’s your elite analysts, your threat hunters, your incident responders, the humans who bring adversarial thinking, organisational context, creative intuition and accountability. These are not skills you can train into a model. 

There’s also a second layer to this: great humans make your AI better. At an AI-native company, your analysts are not just responding to threats, they are informing the models, identifying where AI judgment is drifting and continuously sharpening the system’s ability to learn and react. The feedback loop between your best people and your AI is a competitive advantage that a company bolting AI onto a legacy platform can never replicate.

Being AI-native did not lower the bar for the humans we hire; it raised it, meaning the bar went up, not away.

 

Why We’re Investing in People Right Now, 

A Message From Our CEO

Eric Foster, CEO, TENEX:

“I’ve been in cybersecurity for over 30 years, as a CISO, as a builder, as someone who has watched this threat landscape evolve into something most people still underestimate. The adversaries are using the same AI we are and they never stop. That’s not a reason to pull back on people. That’s exactly why we’re doubling down on them.

Here’s what most people get wrong: the better your AI gets, the more you need exceptional humans to push it, challenge it and make it sharper. Our models don’t get smarter in a vacuum. They get smarter because we have the right analysts, the right leaders and the right thinkers analyzing them every single day. 

The hires we’re announcing today are not despite the AI era. They’re because of it and I consider building this team a national and moral imperative.

At TENEX, we are  not here to build another security tool. We are  here to redefine how this fight gets fought and it takes the best humans and the best AI working together to win it.”

— Eric Foster, CEO, TENEX

These hires are more than symbolic; they represent a clear commitment to TENEX’s foundation and future direction. The people joining us possess the critical ability to analyze the model, recognize its flaws and ultimately use their judgment to stand by the outcome in front of a client, rather than simply relying on a dashboard. This expertise is precisely what this pivotal moment requires of our company.

 

Building Where It Matters: Our Growing Footprint

TENEX is expanding its geographic footprint alongside its team growth. We currently operate out of San Jose, Kansas City (Overland Park), and Sarasota. Plans are in progress to establish new offices in EMEA, Phoenix, and the Northeast, strategically targeting key markets and talent pools crucial for achieving the next stage of our mission.

Every new city is a commitment to the talent there, to the clients nearby and to the broader goal of building a company that can go the distance in the fight against cybercrime. Our funding is going where our conviction is: into people, places and the platform that ties them together.

 

Anything Powerful in Life Rewards the People Who Lean Into It

Think about any major shift in human capability – the printing press, electricity and the internet. In every case, the people who ran toward it rather than away from it didn’t lose their relevance. They gained leverage. They could do more, think bigger and operate at a level that simply wasn’t available to those who waited on the sideline.

AI is that moment right now.

The athletes who embraced film study got sharper. The businesses that embraced the internet didn’t just adapt – they led. The analysts, the leaders and the teams who choose to understand AI, work with it and push it further aren’t threatened by it. They’re multiplied by it.

In cybersecurity, the analyst who embraces AI doesn’t become redundant – they become exceptional. They stop drowning in noise and start doing the work they actually trained for. They bring their instincts, their experience and their judgment to the threats that matter because AI handled everything that didn’t need them. That’s not a smaller role. That’s a larger one.

 

This Is an Inflection Point, Not a Disruption

We are at an inflection point, not a disruption and the difference matters. Disruption implies that something is being broken. Inflection means we have reached a moment where the trajectory changes and the teams who understand that change will build something the others can’t catch up to.

The organizations that will win the next decade are not the ones who fear AI the least. They’re the ones who understood it the earliest. And the companies that will lead those organizations in security are the ones already building around that understanding — with the technology to back it and the people to make it matter.

 

AI-Native. Led by Humans. Together, Doing the Best Work in the Fight Against Cybercrime.

Fear makes sense when change moves fast and the benefits feel abstract. But the picture becomes clear when you stop asking “what will AI take from me?” and start asking “what has it been costing me not to have it?”

Consider what this looks like in practice. A financial services firm handling thousands of endpoints generates an overwhelming volume of alerts daily. A healthcare organization managing patient data across dozens of locations faces a threat surface that never sleeps and regulators who never blink. In both cases the problem isn’t the quality of the people. It’s the structure they’re forced to work inside.

At TENEX the numbers tell the story. Our AI SOC handles 100% of incoming alerts – nothing gets missed, nothing gets deprioritized because a human ran out of hours. It triages 95%+ autonomously with sub-minute response times. Those aren’t vanity metrics. They are the difference between an analyst drowning in noise and one doing the work they were actually trained for – hunting real threats, applying adversarial thinking and making the calls that protect the organization.

AI does not take your seat at the table – it pulls up a chair next to you and makes sure that when the moment that matters arrives, you’re ready for it. Your judgment still wins the room. AI just makes sure you arrive there on time and at your best.

 

That’s what we’re building at TENEX. Not a machine that replaces the best people in security but a platform that finally lets them do the work they were always meant to do. The people joining us today are not a footnote in our AI story. They are our story!

AI-Native. Human-Led. Because One Without the Other is Not Enough. 

The CISO Who Chose the Mission

There are leaders who build impressive careers and leaders who build toward something. Bashar Abouseido has spent over two decades doing both and now he’s bringing all of it to TENEX.

As Senior Vice President and CISO at Charles Schwab, Bashar sat at the intersection of everything that makes enterprise security both critical and complex. He was responsible for the comprehensive cybersecurity strategy and first-line technology risk management across all Schwab companies; a mandate that encompassed hundreds of security professionals, trillions in assets under management, and one of the most scrutinized regulatory environments in financial services. He led the firm’s security posture through the integration of TD Ameritrade, a consolidation that would have tested any team and any platform.

Before Schwab, he held security leadership roles at Thomson Reuters and Rockwell Automation. He has spoken at industry events on the transformative role of AI in helping financial institutions detect, investigate, and respond to threats at scale. He has seen, up close, what happens when the tools aren’t good enough and what becomes possible when they are.

Why Bashar Chose TENEX

Bashar did not have to come to TENEX, someone with his background and track record has options. He chose this company because the mission is real. Not another tool. Not another dashboard. A genuine, AI-native platform built to reduce cybercrime, backed by a team that understands you don’t get there without exceptional humans driving exceptional AI. What drew him here was the chance to be on the other side of that table to bring the outcomes he spent a career demanding as a CISO to the CISOs who need them most. Threats stopped, breaches prevented, security teams finally doing the work they were always meant to do. That’s what TENEX delivers. And that’s what Bashar intends to bring to every enterprise conversation he has from here, not a pitch, but a proof point built for the highest-stakes environments in the world.

As President of TENEX, Bashar will shape the strategic direction of a company built for exactly this moment. We are at an inflection point in this fight, the adversaries are scaling, the complexity is growing, and the window to choose AI-native over AI-adjacent is open right now but won’t stay open forever. Bashar understands that better than almost anyone. It’s why he’s here. And it’s why the enterprises that matter most are about to find out what security that actually delivers looks like.

“I’ve spent my career protecting some of the most complex organizations in the world and every CISO I’ve known has had to fight the same battle, explaining risk to the board, justifying resources, and watching their best people burn out triaging noise instead of stopping real threats. The adversaries aren’t slowing down; they’re scaling and automating and they never stop. The only answer is a platform built to match that and TENEX is the first place I’ve seen AI that genuinely thinks like an elite analyst paired with humans who make it sharper every day. When you can show 98% fewer false positives and a response time under a minute, security stops being a line item to defend and becomes a capability to brag about. That’s not a feature. That’s the future and that’s why I’m here.”
— Bashar Abouseido, President, TENEX

AI-Native. Human-Led. Together, doing the best work in the fight against cybercrime.

Learn more at TENEX.ai.

Why We Raised $250M — And What We’re Going to Do With It

By Eric Foster, CEO, TENEX.AI

We just raised $250M to hire more humans. In the AI era. On purpose. Here’s why.

For my entire career, the bad guys have been winning.

Not because defenders lack talent or the technology doesn’t exist, it’s because the math has been wrong. Attackers scale with automation and defenders scale with headcount. And headcount has never kept up.

Today we’re announcing our Series B led by Crosspoint Capital Partners. This round will fund aggressive hiring, EMEA expansion, deeper partnerships, and continued investment in our leading AI SOC platform that processes 100% of customer alert telemetry in under a minute.

What We’ve Built in 

As of this release, in March 2026, we are almost to the day one year in the market – one year since first revenue, after coming out of stealth in early 2025. In that short time, we’ve made absolutely incredible progress:

We serve amazing enterprise customers who trust us with their security operations. We’ve generated over $25M in contracted revenue and 318% year-over-year headcount growth. We are ranked #1 on the 2026 Cyber 150, the definitive ranking of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies. But the size of the company isn’t what matters, and as much as our industry tends to focus on funding or valuation, that’s not what matters either. We believe we’re going to build the biggest and best security services company to ever exist. But even that isn’t the point — it’s a required step toward the objective that actually matters. We’re keeping the main thing the main thing: making a material difference in cybercrime. 

That’s what this funding is for. It’s not a number on a term sheet. It’s a chance to put hundreds more people into the fight this year, armed with AI that makes each of them 10X more effective than they would be anywhere else. The name TENEX reflects this commitment to achieving a tenfold increase in effectiveness. With our human-led but AI-driven service we are able to make a real difference where it matters: 100% of alerts in under a minute, while the industry average SOC reviews roughly 10%. A real 95%+ reduction in false positives, giving defenders back the time to focus on threats that actually matter.

TENEX was fundamentally built AI native, integrating it from the very first line of code, rather than retrofitting AI onto an existing, legacy platform. Our agentic AI triages, investigates, and surfaces findings to human analysts who make every critical decision. AI handles the volume. Humans handle the judgment. That’s not a feature. That’s the architecture. That’s the mission. 

Where the Money Goes

This is not a “put it in the bank and figure it out” round. We have a plan.

People. 250+ new hires. Engineers, SOC analysts, sales, customer success. Our hiring philosophy is simple: AI makes our humans ten times more efficient, so every person we add has outsized impact. We are building the highest performing, most capable team in the fight against cybercrime, and we are just getting started.

EMEA Expansion. The international demand signal is clear. Regulatory pressure, expanding attack surfaces, and a severe talent shortage are making traditional SOC models untenable across Europe. We’re building the team and partner infrastructure to meet that demand — and we’re moving fast.

More Partnerships, More Hyper Scale. We are the AI-native services partner that delivers hyperscaler security platform outcomes. With this funding, we build even deeper integrations, more certifications, more co-sell motions, across more partners. This is where scale compounds.

Threat Intelligence & AI R&D. Our AI triage accuracy is already exceeding all expectations and increasing incredibly in both speed and efficacy quarter over quarter. Our AI SOC platform that exists today – which is not the platform that will exist in twelve months.

What Crosspoint Sees

“TENEX has reimagined the managed security services industry and built something differentiated: an AI-native platform with elite human expertise to protect enterprises at scale. The company stops threats with the speed needed to defend an AI-enabled advisory and is delivering that value with an excellent financial model,” said Greg Clark, Managing Partner at Crosspoint Capital Partners. “TENEX provides better gross margins than traditional software, where customers buy an outcome like traditional managed service offerings. With TENEX, there are no trapped resources or associated incremental headcount per customer. The financial opportunity in the AI enablement comes from the market’s underestimation of how AI can transform the value of services industries. The MDR market is massive and can now operate profitably. Crosspoint Capital is excited about this backdrop and the opportunity at TENEX.”

What Comes Next

This is the first time in history that defenders can actually take ground from the enemy. AI gives us the leverage. This funding gives us the fuel. The team we’re building gives us the force.

AI-Native. Human-Led. Together, doing the best work in the fight against cybercrime.

We have a lot more to talk about.

Tenex.ai is an AI-Native, Human-Led managed detection and response company. Learn more at Tenex.AI .

Read The Full Announcement

And We Are Proving It With The People We Are Hiring

There’s a narrative in the market right now that AI means fewer people. That the companies winning with AI are the ones cutting headcount the fastest.

We think that’s exactly backwards.

At TENEX, we’ve been AI-native from day one. Our platform processes 100% of the alerts in under a minute and is triaged by AI before a human analyst ever sees it. That’s the kind of efficiency that should, in theory, mean we need fewer people. It actually means we need better ones. Because when AI handles the noise, analysts’ finally get to do the work that actually matters like the thinking, the hunting and the judgment calls that no model can make. The bar doesn’t go away, it goes up.

Today we’re announcing three strategic leadership appointments that prove exactly that.

Bashar Abouseido — President

Former Senior Vice President (SVP) & Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Charles Schwab, where he led cybersecurity strategy and first-line technology risk management across one of the world’s largest financial institutions. Bashar has operated at the highest levels of enterprise security, in one of the most regulated industries in the world. He chose this company because the mission is real. Official Press Release here.

 

Piers Morgan — Head of International

Piers has spent 20+ years at the heart of EMEA and Asia Pacific cybersecurity where he has built go-to-market strategies across the channel, forged the partner relationships that actually move markets and developed a deep understanding of what enterprises across Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific need from their security partners. He knows the buyers, the regulators, the ecosystem and the pressure points. Having led successful GTM teams at Pulse Secure, eSentire and most recently Coro, Piers brings a proven track record of building and scaling international cybersecurity businesses across some of the world’s most complex and competitive markets. Connect with Piers Morgan.

 

 

Ryan Swigler — Head of Customer Success

Ryan Swigler is a strategic Customer Success leader with a proven history of scaling SaaS organizations for the world’s largest enterprises. Most recently as Vice President at Okta, Ryan oversaw $2B in ARR and led diverse teams of up to 250 people, achieving consistent 110%+ net retention. Ryan knows what world-class customer outcomes look like and his mandate at Tenex is simple: enhancing the customer experience and delivering on commitments through verifiable results. Connect with Ryan Swigler.

 

 

 

These aren’t symbolic hires. They are a direct statement about what TENEX is building and where we are going. The best AI. The best humans. Together, doing the best work in the fight against cybercrime. With offices in San Jose, Kansas City (Overland Park), Sarasota and expansion underway into Phoenix and Europe, TENEX.AI is putting its funding, its hiring, and its conviction exactly where they belong.

AI-Native. Human-Led. Together, doing the best work in the fight against cybercrime.

 Learn more at Tenex.AI .