Ent Emerges from Stealth to Bring Prevention Back to Cybersecurity

Ent, the intent-aware security platform powering the AI-native enterprise, extending endpoint security into a real-time layer of prevention across human and AI-driven work, Elias(Lou)Manousos and Brandon Dixon, has emerged from stealth with $100 million in seed financing led by Decibel, with participation from Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel (IQT).

Preventing Cyber Threats Before They Become Incidents.

Ent is pioneering a cybersecurity approach built on the premise that AI is dramatically reducing the time between a security compromise and its consequences. In this environment, prevention becomes increasingly critical. The company’s platform is designed to identify and intervene in risky actions by both human users and AI agents before they escalate into security incidents.

The platform is already deployed across Global 2000 organizations in industries including hospitality, financial services, and defense. Customers use Ent to address challenges such as insider risk, AI governance, data loss prevention, last-mile threat detection, and incident investigations, providing teams with behavioral context to better understand what occurred, why it happened, and how to respond.

Elias Manousos on the Future of Cybersecurity.

According to Elias Manousos, AI is fundamentally changing both how organizations operate and how quickly cyber threats can unfold. As the time between compromise and impact continues to shrink, traditional security approaches that focus primarily on detection and response are becoming less effective.

Manousos argues that cybersecurity must shift from a reactive model toward one centered on prevention. In this view, understanding intent and behavior in real time, across both human users and AI agents, is essential to identifying and stopping risk before it escalates into a security incident.

A New Security Layer for Human and AI Workflows.

Ent is built on the belief that effective prevention requires visibility at the point where work actually happens, across browsers, applications, AI workflows, and autonomous agents. Traditional security tools often rely on process logs and file events, providing visibility only after risky activity has already occurred.

To address this gap, Ent operates as a dedicated behavioral layer that analyzes intent in real time across both human users and AI agents. Deployed within a customer's own cloud environment to maintain data sovereignty, the platform uses a lightweight endpoint agent to monitor activity across applications, workflows, data movement, and local runtimes.

By combining behavioral visibility with AI-driven reasoning, Ent evaluates actions as they occur, applies organization-specific policies, and enables just-in-time interventions designed to prevent incidents before they happen.

Industry Leaders Back a Prevention-First Security Model.

Investors and industry leaders see Ent as part of a broader shift from reactive security toward real-time prevention. As AI-powered attacks become more sophisticated, traditional endpoint security approaches that rely on signals generated after an action has occurred are increasingly viewed as insufficient.

According to Jon Sakoda, the cybersecurity industry has been waiting for a defensive solution capable of keeping pace with the rise of large language models. He believes Ent's use of specialized AI models and adaptive policy enforcement enables organizations to detect and prevent malicious activity in real time.

Konstantin Buhler highlights the platform's ability to bring AI reasoning directly to the endpoint, shifting security from post-event detection to intervention at the moment decisions are made. In his view, this represents a foundational change in how endpoint protection will evolve.

Similarly, Greg Clark argues that AI-driven threats require a renewed focus on prevention and resilience, with the intelligence needed to stop attacks residing directly on devices rather than solely in centralized systems.

For government and regulated environments, Grant Whiting points to the importance of secure AI adoption. He sees Ent's ability to provide real-time visibility, governance, and forensic records across devices as a key capability for organizations seeking to deploy AI safely and responsibly.

Expanding the Platform and Team.

Ent brings together a team of engineers and security practitioners with extensive enterprise experience, supported by advisors that include former security leaders from Google, Aetna, MassMutual, the NSA, and Microsoft Azure Cloud Security.

The new funding will be used to expand engineering and go-to-market teams while accelerating development across key areas including AI governance, threat prevention, security integrations, and multimodal endpoint intelligence.

The platform is currently available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser-based deployments. Ent will also showcase its technology at Black Hat USA 2026, taking place in Las Vegas from August 1–6, 2026.