Tenzai was founded in 2025 by cybersecurity veterans Pavel Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal, and Aner Mazur. Gurvich and Zeitlin previously co-founded micro-segmentation company Guardicore, which was acquired by Akamai in 2021 for roughly $600 million, and several of the Tenzai team were part of Guardicore's founding group. The company set out to rebuild penetration testing for an era in which software, increasingly written or assisted by AI, ships faster than human red teams can test it.
The core product is an autonomous AI penetration tester, an 'AI hacker' that conducts complete, end-to-end engagements across enterprise applications. Rather than running a fixed checklist, Tenzai's agents discover vulnerabilities, attempt exploitation, and chain multiple weaknesses together to reveal complex, multi-step attack paths that mirror how a skilled human attacker would operate. Each finding is delivered as a reproducible exploit accompanied by actionable remediation guidance, so engineering teams can verify and fix issues with confidence.
A key selling point is continuous coverage. Because the AI does not require manual red-team scheduling, organizations can test far more of their application portfolio, far more often. Tenzai cites customer outcomes such as compliance testing many times faster and scaling from testing a small fraction of critical applications to all of them without expanding the security team. The company also emphasizes its AI's competitive pedigree, stating it ranked in the top one percent across six global hacking competition platforms, outperforming roughly 99% of human competitors.
Tenzai raised $75 million in a seed round led by Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Lux Capital, with participation from Swish Ventures, Jibe Ventures, and others; the company describes it as the largest seed round ever raised in cybersecurity. With a proven founding team, a record raise, and a focus on securing AI-generated code through autonomous offensive testing, Tenzai is positioned as a leading entrant in the rapidly growing AI penetration testing category.