A month after raising $27 million, a cybersecurity company says it is planning to scale its business, including hiring more than 100 employees and establishing a world headquarters in Sarasota.
Tenex, which uses AI and human expertise to provide enterprise security, says it is now backed by Orlando-based venture capital firm DeepWork Capital and the Florida Opportunity Fund, a state initiative that promotes economic growth through targeted investments. The new investors were among those who contributed to the company’s $27 million in Series A funding, Tenex CEO Eric Foster says in an email.
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.
“This support enables us to scale globally while committing to regional growth,” Foster says in a statement. “In Sarasota we’ll be able to hire top AI and cyber talent.”
With its new funding, the company plans to hire up to 100 high-skilled AI and cybersecurity employees in Sarasota over the next couple of years, according to the statement.
While Tenex says it anticipates “proportional growth” at its offices near Kansas City, Missouri and San Jose, the company plans to establish its global headquarters in Sarasota.
It is currently in the process of building out its new location in central Sarasota, Foster confirms in an email.
“By rooting our headquarters in Florida, we’re not only benefiting from an amazing pro-business administration,” Foster says in a statement, “but also the incredible Tampa Bay area cybersecurity talent pool.”
When it comes to finding talent, Tenex will get a boost from a tech mogul in the region. Arnie Bellini, founder and CEO of Bellini Capital and founder of Tampa software company Connectwise, says in a statement that he plans to connect Tenex with advanced research partnerships, a “community of tech startups and solution builders” and top graduates from USF’s Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, named after he and his wife donated $40 million to the college.
Current jobs posted by Tenex in Sarasota include cybersecurity analyst, AI engineer, software engineer and customer success manager.
The flagship product for Tenex is its managed detection and response service, developed using artificial intelligence. It helps organizations detect and handle cyber threats through AI agents that that escalate issues to humans as needed. The company sees the future of security as reliant on “machine-scale decision-making” with human oversight, it previously said in a statement.
In addition to bolstering its head count and establishing a global headquarters, Tenex says the recent funding will accelerate its efforts to expand sales to meet growing demand; to support customers with faster, more cost-effective response; and to engineer its agentic AI capabilities.
