In one of the largest seed investments to ever hit the cybersecurity world, Endpoint security startup Ent has announced its stealth opening with a whopping $100 million seed funding round.
Decibel led the funding round, joined by Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis and In-Q-Tel. Cybersecurity veterans Elias Manousos and Brandon Dixon founded the company after having built security products before they started building at Microsoft.
Before being acquired by Microsoft for more than $500 million in 2021, Manousos helped scale RiskIQ. He subsequently was instrumental in the launch of Microsoft Security Copilot. Dixon was co-founder of PassiveTotal, which RiskIQ acquired, and he continued with both acquisitions, before working on Security Copilot.
The founders feel that modern security tools are failing to match the increasing extent of AI systems that are being deployed within organisations. Most of the endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms are used to identify malware or suspicious software behavior. Yet most of the risks today arise from actions taken by an authorised user (or AI agent) that can be considered normal behaviour.
To tackle this problem, Ent provides a platform specifically designed to understand the intent behind an action before it happens. The software is compatible across Windows, macOS, Linux devices and also via a web browser extension. The platform observes what users do across applications, browsers, and data movement in addition to local AI tools by monitoring behaviors around an action taken supervised against company policy.
If a user tries to move sensitive data to an unauthorised location, Ent is in a position to stop the activity right away – as opposed to just sending off an alert after the fact. According to the company, this approach is called intent-aware security and available as a layer sitting beside any existing endpoint and identity protection tools customers may be using.
The endpoint detection and response is still one of the fastest growing segments in cybersecurity as organisations grapple with ever larger digital environments, combined with mounting cyber threats. Analysts predict the number will increase substantially in the next few years as companies look for stronger protection especially over devices, cloud services and AI-driven systems.
Ent claims that its technology is already used by Global 2000 companies from sectors including hospitality, financial services and defence. The company has also put together an advisory board featuring former security leaders from major organisations including Google, Aetna, MassMutual and Microsoft Azure Cloud Security and the National Security Agency, although it declined to name any customer names.
This newly raised capital will go toward product development, increasing engineering staff and hiring along with the expansion of what Ent calls multimodal endpoint intelligence. Armed with powerful investors and experienced founders, it is now a matter of demonstrating that it takes on an entirely different level of security for the modern enterprise.
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