For most of the past decade, the security industry quietly gave up on prevention. Breaches were treated as inevitable, and the money went into detecting and cleaning up the mess afterwards. A new startup from two veterans of that industry says AI has made stopping the attack in the first place possible again, and investors have handed it $100m to prove it.
Ent, founded by Elias ‘Lou’ Manousos and Brandon Dixon, came out of stealth on 16 June with a $100m seed round led by Decibel. Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, also took part, in what SiliconANGLE called one of the largest seed rounds in cybersecurity history.
The founders know the territory. The pair built RiskIQ, sold it to Microsoft in 2021 in a deal SiliconANGLE puts at more than $500m, and then helped create Microsoft Security Copilot. Their new company is, in effect, a bet against the model the rest of the industry, Microsoft included, currently runs on.
Why prevention is possible again, according to Ent
The industry’s pivot to detection had a practical cause. To stop something before it happens, you have to understand it in real time, at the moment of decision, and the heavy processing lived in the cloud. The round trip from the device and back was too slow, so tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR) settled for spotting trouble after the fact.
