AI‑cybersecurity startup Tenex has raised $250 million in a Series B round at a valuation of more than $1 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal is the latest sign that investor appetite for AI‑driven security tools is rising alongside the threat landscape they are meant to defend.
The round was led by Crosspoint Capital, with participation from Shield Capital and DeepWork Capital. The Sarasota, Florida‑based company had previously raised $27 million in a Series A in September 2025, also led by Crosspoint Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital participating.
The jump from $27 million to $250 million in roughly seven months reflects the heightened investor interest in AI‑powered managed detection and response (MDR) at scale.
Tenex was founded in 2024 in Sarasota, Florida, by Eric Foster, Ryan Shreve, Edwin Solis, and Venkata Koppaka, drawing on backgrounds in managed security services, cloud‑native infrastructure, and enterprise‑scale security operations. The company sells an AI detection and response (MDR) service that continuously monitors enterprise environments for active threats and responds to them, rather than simply testing systems for vulnerabilities before an attack occurs.
Its model pairs automated triage and investigation with human‑in‑the‑loop analysts who make final decisions on critical incidents. Tenex says its platform processes 100% of customer alert telemetry in under one minute, whereas many traditional SOCs inspect only a small fraction of alerts due to staffing and tooling constraints.
The company also claims a roughly 95% reduction in false positives, though these figures are self‑reported and not independently audited.
Unlike CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex family,Tenex positions itself as the AI‑native security layer that operationalises protection within the platforms where most enterprise workloads live, betting that the security market will consolidate around the major cloud providers.
