Israeli AI-native cybersecurity company Tenzai, which is redefining penetration testing through autonomous, agentic AI, today announced it has emerged from stealth with a $75 million seed round. The round was led by Greylock Partners, Lux Capital, and Battery Ventures, with participation from Swish Ventures and prominent angel investors.
Tenzai was founded just six months ago by cybersecurity veterans Pavel Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal, and Aner Mazur. Gurvich and Zeitlin previously cofounded Guardicore, with Ziv and Tal as part of the company’s founding team. Guardicore was later acquired by Akamai in 2021 for $600 million, one of Akamai’s largest acquisitions to date. Mazur was founding CPO at Snyk. The team has major cyberattack experience from their service in military intelligence and in leading security teams. Tenzai currently has 20 employees.
Tenzai cofounder and CEO Pavel Gurvich said, «Pentesting hasn’t changed much since I was a pentester in high school some 25 years ago. Back then the work was episodic and manual. Today, AI allows us to bring elite, nation-grade offensive capabilities at a scale and speed that were previously impossible. In large enterprises with hundreds of applications that change daily, providing real security assurance is only possible with autonomous AI that can find and fix vulnerabilities at enterprise scale. That’s why we built Tenzai — to bring always-on offensive capabilities so organizations can move fast and stay secure.»
Gurvich says the idea behind Tanzai was born after he and his friends left Akamai and were planning to take a break. «We left Akamai and planned to rest, to be with family, but we quickly started asking ourselves what’s next,» he says, adding that they realized that in this field, which he says is close to their hearts, there is a huge opportunity.
«In a world where for every dollar spent on software, five dollars are spent on services, the field of cybersecurity services has hardly undergone a real revolution. That’s where there is a huge opportunity to innovate through AI,» he says. «The most complex field in cybersecurity is penetration testing, when organizations hire external hackers who try to break into their systems to find weaknesses. It’s a method that works, but it’s expensive, slow, and dependent on the availability of human experts.»
Gurvich explains that the shortage of quality security experts only exacerbates the problem. He explains, «There are very few truly good experts in the market, and the demand is only growing. When there are not enough skilled hands, the quality suffers, and the tests become too superficial and not accessible enough. We want to change that, to make the tests continuous, autonomous, and available to any organization at any given moment.»
The five entrepreneurs — four veterans of the IDF’s cyber units and another entrepreneur who joined them — have been working together for two decades. «We have been friends for 20 years, building, arguing, doing things together,» he says. «We know how to argue without fighting, and that is a great gift. We have a lot of scars from past experience — how to build an enterprise, how to take a disruptive product to market, how to work properly with customers. These things cannot be learned in theory. Only when a customer is angry with you, and you need to help them, do you really learn how to build a company.»
Tanzai already works with large organizations in finance, healthcare and technology. «We have clients that are not startups, but the upper end of the market, companies with heavy regulation and data sensitivity, where the problems are really tough,» he says. «We feel very privileged to solve a real problem that has been with the software and cybersecurity world for years.»
Published by Globes, Israel business news — en.globes.co.il — on November 11, 2025.
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