Why we backed Tenet: The Security Platform for AI Agents

‍MizMaa Ventures is an early stage, thesis-driven venture capital firminvesting in Israeli deep-technology entrepreneurs. This is the case for Tenet,the company we led this round at because we believe Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran are building one of the defining security companies of the next decade.

Today, Tenet officially comes out of stealth. MizMaa backed Tenet's $6M Seed round, alongside The Westly Group. We have been working closely with the Tenet teamfor the past year. We are convinced this is the team that builds the Security Platform for the Agentic Layer.

The Team

We invest in founders who have spent serious time on the offensive side of aproblem before they decide to build the defense. That kind of credibility, where the founder has actually built the attacks they are now defending against, is what makes a security company architecturally credible from dayone. It is also the consistent pattern across every defining security companywe have seen.

Barak Sternberg and Nevo Poran led one of the first AI security research teams frominside Cisco's AI Defense. They were running adversarial research on autonomousAI agents before the rest of the market had named the attack surface. They named some of the agentic attack techniques the industry now references.

Their offensive security experience is a matter of record. They are 8200 veteranswith over 17 years of combined experience in elite offensive and defensivesecurity research, and have spoken at DEFCON, Black Hat, Hacktivity, Rootcon,and BSides. Barak is a recipient of the Israel Defense Prize.

Between Cisco and Tenet, they built Wild Pointer, a profitable cybersecurity research firm that reached multi-million dollar revenue. They walked away from it because the threat surface was outrunning the response.

The category

Every major security category in the last two decades was defined in the year or twoafter a new attack surface became operational. Endpoint security followed laptops leaving the corporate network, cloud security after workloads moved off-prem, and identity security as SaaS sprawled across the enterprise. Each category was defined in a window of months, and the companies that established themselves first set the standard for the decade that followed.

Thea gentic layer is now operational. AI agents are writing code, accessing customer data, calling APIs, and moving across production systems on their own. According to Tenet's own research, more than 50% of deployed AI agents are vulnerable to remote agentic takeover. The existing security stack, built forprocesses, identities, and prompt-layer text, was not built  to observe what an autonomous agent is actually doing at runtime. Tenet is building the platform that observes it.

The architecture

Tenet's architecture combines three capabilities the existing security stack does nothave: 

1. Agent-Side Simulation (patent pending). When something gets flagged, Tenet simulatesthe outcome of the agent's next moves in a sandbox before they execute againstreal infrastructure. Three steps ahead of every agent, every time. Every blockships with a full simulation trace, not a probabilistic alert. 

2. A light weight runtime sensor that sees three layers simultaneously. OS behavior, network and API calls, and LLM reasoning. No gateways, no proxies, no SDKs. No code changes. Deploys in 10 minutes. Covers coding agents (Cursor, Claude, Codex, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot) and cloud agents (Azure Foundry, Bedrock). 

3. Intelligence-Based Inspection. Trained on millions of live agentic sessions across 1,000+ unique agent profiles, Tenet knows where to look and where not to. Selective scanning at sub-20ms latency. Developers never notice it is the

Why Now

The agentic layer is operational at the enterprise today. The category for securingit will be defined in the next twelve to eighteen months. The companies that establish themselves in this window set the standard for the decade that follows. We have invested with that timing in mind.

MizMaa is proud to be backing Barak, Nevo, and the entire team at Tenet. Autonomous agents are the new layer and Tenet is securing them now. They are building thelayer that secures it, and we are proud to be on this journey with them.

Visit www.tenetsecurity.ai formore information.

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