Cybersecurity services startup Tenex raises $250M in funding | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #ransomware

Tenex.ai Inc., a provider of managed threat detection and response services, today announced that it raised $250 million in funding.

Crosspoint Capital Partners led the Series B round with participation from Shield Capital and DeepWork Capital. The cash infusion comes about a year after Tenex’s launch. The company says that its contracted revenue, or the combined value of all its customer contracts, has reached $25 million.

Tenex scans companies’ infrastructure for malicious activity to ease the work of their internal information technology teams. Additionally, the company’s cybersecurity professionals can remediate the breaches they find. The company delivers its services with the help of a custom software platform that uses artificial intelligence agents to find threats.

Historically, IT teams reviewed only a small percentage of the cybersecurity data generated by their company’s corporate network due to technical constraints. Tenex says that its platform analyzes all the available data to avoid overlooking potential issues. According to the company, the built-in AI agents analyze telemetry within a minute of ingesting it and can reduce false positives by more than 95% in some cases.

“Our agentic AI triages, investigates and surfaces findings to human analysts who make every critical decision,” Tenex Chief Executive Officer Eric Foster wrote in a blog post. “AI handles the volume. Humans handle the judgment.”

Tenex offers its managed cybersecurity service in three editions with different price points and capabilities.

Customers that buy the entry-level package can have Tenex set up a customized deployment of Google SecOps. It’s a cybersecurity platform offered by Google Cloud that can collect cybersecurity data from a company’s systems, prepare it for analysis and find threats. It can process data from not only the search giant’s platform but also workloads deployed on external infrastructure.

Tenex engineers help customers create Google SecOps playbooks. Those are automation workflows that enable the cybersecurity platform to perform some tasks without manual input. A playbook can, for example, enrich a breach alert with relevant threat intelligence. Tenex also trains client organizations’ employees how to use Google SecOps.

The two other editions of the company’s service enable customers to offload day-to-day breach detection tasks to its cybersecurity team. According to Tenex, the mid-level plan gives companies access to advice on emerging threats and other support. The third, most expensive service tier, meanwhile, provides round-the-clock cybersecurity monitoring and breach remediation.

Tenex’s focus also extends beyond Google SecOps. It can help enterprises deploy Microsoft Corp.’s competing security operations software, which covers many of the same use cases.

Tenex will use the proceeds from its funding round to establish more partnerships. According to the company, the initiative will focus on inking new co-selling agreements and integrating its AI platform with more third-party products. Tenex also plans to hire over 250 engineers, salespeople and other professionals to support its growth efforts. 

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