Ent, the endpoint security startup founded by ex-Microsoft leaders behind RiskIQ and Security Copilot, has raised $100M in seed funding to stop AI-era threats before they strike.

Ent emerges from stealth to bring prevention back to cybersecurity. Ent emerged from stealth with $100 million in seed financing. The company is pioneering a new approach to cybersecurity built around the simple belief that AI compresses the time between compromise and impact; prevention must once again become the primary objective of security. Ent's platform helps organizations understand and intervene in risky actions by humans and AI agents before they become incidents. Ent is already deployed with Global 2000 customers across hospitality, financial services, and defense. Customers use Ent to detect insider risk, govern AI usage, prevent data loss, stop last-mile threats, and investigate incidents with the full behavioral context of what happened, why it happened, and what should happen next. "Security has been stuck in a reactive loop for over a decade, but AI-powered attacks require new thinking," said Elias Manousos, CEO and co-founder of Ent. "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." Prevention requires a new layer at the workspace where work happens, across the browser, apps, AI workflows, and agents. Existing tools are blind because they collect at the wrong layer, tied to process and file events, and respond too late. As enterprises consolidate the platforms that protect endpoints, identities, applications, and data, the layer that reads intent across humans and AI agents in real time becomes the critical one. Ent operates at that layer. Hosted in the customer's cloud with complete data sovereignty, Ent runs as a lightweight agent that brings AI reasoning to endpoints. The platform observes behavior across applications, browsers, workflows, data movement, and local runtimes; evaluates human and AI agent intent at the moment of use, applies customer-defined policy, and acts through configurable, just-in-time interventions before incidents occur. The funding is led by Decibel, with participation from Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel (IQT). "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," said Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner at Decibel. "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." "For a decade, endpoint security has relied on signals that arrive after the user's action is complete," said Konstantin Buhler, Partner at Sequoia. "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." "We have entered a new era defined by AI-powered attacks, one that demands a return to prevention and resilience," said Greg Clark, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Crosspoint Capital Partners. "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." "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," said Steve Bowsher, CEO at IQT. "They can see what people are doing with AI in the moment, and they have a comprehensive record of what happened on every device." Ent's team brings together engineers and security operators with deep enterprise experience. The company's advisors include former CISOs of Google, Aetna, and MassMutual, the former Director of the NSA, and the former CVP of Microsoft Azure Cloud Security. The new funding will support continued hiring across engineering and go-to-market, while accelerating Ent's roadmap across AI governance, threat prevention, security integrations, and multimodal endpoint intelligence. Ent is generally available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser-extension deployments. David Marshall has been involved in the technology industry for over 30 years, and he's been working with virtualization software since 1999. He became a pioneer in the virtualization and cloud computing field - one of the few people in the industry allowed to work with Alpha stage server virtualization software from industry leaders: VMware (ESX Server), Connectix and Microsoft (Virtual Server).Through the years, he has invented, marketed and helped launch a number of successful software companies and products. David holds a BS degree in Finance, an Information Technology Certification, and a number of vendor certifications. He's also co-authored two published books: "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center" and "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center" and was the technical editor for two popular Virtualization "For Dummies" books. With his remaining spare time, David founded and operates one of the oldest independent modern data center publications, VMblog.com. And co-founded CloudCow.com, a publication dedicated to Cloud Computing. Since 2009, and each year thereafter, David has been honored with the vExpert distinction by VMware by Broadcom for his evangelism.Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarshall/