Ent emerged from stealth with $100 million in seed financing as the company seeks to bring prevention back to cybersecurity through its intent-aware Workspace Security platform.
The San Francisco-based company said its platform is designed to help organizations understand and intervene in risky actions by humans and AI agents before they become security incidents. Ent is already deployed with Global 2000 customers across the hospitality, financial services, and defense sectors.
Customers are using the platform to detect insider threats, govern AI usage, prevent data loss, stop last-mile attacks, and investigate incidents with behavioral context around what happened and why.
Ent said the rapid adoption of AI is compressing the time between compromise and impact, making traditional reactive security approaches increasingly ineffective. The company believes prevention must once again become the primary objective of cybersecurity.
Hosted within customers’ cloud environments, Ent operates through a lightweight endpoint agent that brings AI reasoning to devices. The platform observes behavior across applications, browsers, workflows, data movement, and local runtimes, evaluating both human and AI agent intent in real time and applying customer-defined policies before incidents occur.
The funding round was led by Decibel and included participation from Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel.
According to the company, the new capital will support continued hiring across engineering and go-to-market functions while accelerating product development in AI governance, threat prevention, security integrations, and multimodal endpoint intelligence.
Founded by RiskIQ co-founders Elias Manousos and Brandon Dixon, along with members of the Microsoft Security Copilot team, Ent offers support for Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser-extension deployments. The company plans to showcase its platform at Black Hat USA 2026 in Las Vegas.
KEY QUOTES:
“Security has been stuck in a reactive loop for over a decade, but AI-powered attacks require new thinking. AI is changing both how people work and how quickly attackers can act. What once took days now happens in seconds. By the time traditional security systems detect a problem, it is too late. We believe the future of security lies in understanding intent in real time across people and AI agents and stopping risk before it becomes an incident.”
Elias Manousos, CEO and Co-Founder of Ent
“AI has been a killer app for hackers and offensive researchers, but the industry is waiting for a novel defensive solution that can keep up with the modern era of LLMs. Ent has reimagined what is possible to protect the endpoint by using specialized AI models and adaptive policy enforcement to detect and prevent malicious activity in real time. It’s a game changer for cybersecurity teams who need a paradigm shift to defend their workforce against LLM-based attacks.”
Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner at Decibel
“For a decade, endpoint security has relied on signals that arrive after the user’s action is complete. By running AI reasoning directly on the device, Ent moves from detection to prevention at the moment of decision. That shift is where the next era of endpoint defense gets built.”
Konstantin Buhler, Partner at Sequoia
“We have entered a new era defined by AI-powered attacks, one that demands a return to prevention and resilience. The level of inference required to stop threats before they materialize must now live directly on the endpoint. Ent is leading this fundamental shift in endpoint protection.”
Greg Clark, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Crosspoint Capital Partners
“We are working with agencies where AI adoption is outpacing the ability of most enterprises to govern it, and where forensic clarity matters as much as prevention. Ent gives them both. They can see what people are doing with AI in the moment, and they have a comprehensive record of what happened on every device.”
Steve Bowsher, CEO of In-Q-Tel
