Guardicore founders launch Tenzai with $75M Seed round to build autonomous “hacker” AI
The Israeli startup is targeting the $8B penetration testing market with continuous, software-based defense.
Cybersecurity company Tenzai, founded by veterans of Guardicore, has 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 was first revealed by Calcalist in May this year.
Full list of Israeli high-tech funding rounds in 2025
“In cybersecurity, for every dollar an organization spends on products, it spends about five on services,” said Pavel Gurvich, CEO and co-founder of Tenzai. “There’s a huge opportunity to attack the services market through software, thanks to AI.”
According to Gurvich, the company’s core insight is that hacking, the most advanced skill in cybersecurity, can now be replicated and scaled through AI. “Until today, this work was done manually by a small number of highly skilled professionals,” he said. “We realized that AI could fundamentally change the equation. We can now build these capabilities directly into software, and the need for this ability is greater than ever.”
Gurvich said Tenzai raised a large round to accelerate product development and attract top talent. “We’re focused on building the best team we can, wherever we find it,” he said. “Talented people in this field are very expensive, and taking such technology to market at scale, while building an aggressive sales organization, requires significant resources. We could have raised even more, but we were selective about who joined us.”
Related articles:
Tenzai plans to begin selling its product early next year and is already working with several leading global companies. “We believe this is the largest Seed round ever raised in the cybersecurity sector,” Gurvich noted.
The company is developing an AI platform that simulates a hacker, proactively attacking and identifying vulnerabilities in organizational systems before they can be exploited. The platform operates continuously, detecting complex and hard-to-find security gaps and helping organizations fix them at the rapid pace demanded by the AI era.
Tenzai operates in the field of penetration testing, a global market estimated at about $8 billion annually. Most of this market relies on human experts hired for limited engagements. Tenzai’s software offers a continuous, automated alternative, enabling organizations to test a large number of applications accurately, consistently, and without the limitations of external consultants.
Tenzai was founded in May 2025 by Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal, and Aner Mazur. Gurvich and Zeitlin previously co-founded 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 company currently employs 18 people.
