AI-driven Sarasota tech company raises $27M

A Sarasota cybersecurity company raised $27 million in a Series A funding round, officials say in a Sept. 11 statement.

TENEX.ai, which is based on Potter Park Drive in south Sarasota County, plans to use the money to “fuel aggressive expansion” including hiring engineers more quickly, scaling sales and marketing efforts and improving customer support, the statement says.

The Series A funding round was led by California-based Crosspoint Capital Partners, with full participation from existing investors Silicon Valley area venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Shield Capital. There was also participation from strategic investors who have not been identified. Andreessen Horowitz has some $46 billion in assets under management, and has invested money in some of the world's biggest tech companies. That list includes Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Foursquare, Roblox, Substack and more.

TENEX.ai’s flagship product is its managed detection and response (MDR) service, developed from the ground up using artificial intelligence. It helps organizations detect and handle cyber threats through AI agents that “triage alerts, correlate signals and initiate responses” that will be escalated to humans “when necessary,” according to the statement; the company says in the statement that the future of security is in "machine-scale decision-making" with human oversight.

“We’re not here to build another tool. We’re here to reinvent the service layer of cybersecurity: agentic, autonomous and scaled globally,” TENEX.ai CEO Eric Foster says in a statement. 

TENEX.ai was founded in 2024 with a mission to transform enterprise security, according to LinkedIn.

“In less than a year, TENEX has signed multiple Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers, and built a cutting-edge AI platform. The company has already exceeded $10M in revenue, and scaled operations globally,” TENEX Chairman Elias “Lou” Manousos, a former Microsoft executive, says in the statement. 

“This funding accelerates our momentum and cements our role as the company defining the future of Managed Detection and Response," Manousos says. "The market is no longer asking if MDR will be transformed by AI; TENEX is proving the model others will follow.”