Ex-Microsoft Security Copilot Team Raises $100 Million Seed Round for AI-Era Endpoint Startup Ent
On June 16, 2026, San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Ent emerged from stealth with $100 million in seed financing—one of the largest seed rounds ever raised in the sector, according to SecurityWeek and Tech Funding News. The round was led by Decibel Partners, with Sequoia Capital, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel, the United States intelligence community's venture arm, all participating. The breadth and calibre of the investor syndicate is itself a statement: the people with the deepest knowledge of both offensive and defensive security believe that the current generation of endpoint protection is approaching obsolescence.
Ent was founded by Elias Manousos and Brandon Dixon, whose previous company RiskIQ was acquired by Microsoft for more than $500 million in 2021, as Tech Funding News reported. At Microsoft, the pair contributed to building Security Copilot, an AI-powered security operations tool. Their founding thesis at Ent is direct: AI has compressed the time between initial compromise and material damage to the point where detection-first architectures can no longer protect enterprises effectively. As Manousos told Information Security Media Group, the company's core bet is that running AI reasoning models directly on the endpoint device—rather than routing telemetry to a cloud-based detection engine—allows Ent to intervene at the moment of a risky action rather than after the damage is done.
The platform, which Ent describes as an intent-aware Workspace Security system, deploys a lightweight software agent that continuously evaluates the behavioral patterns of both human users and autonomous AI agents operating within corporate environments. According to Business Wire's official announcement, the product is already generally available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser-extension deployments. Ent stated it is already deployed with Global 2000 customers across the hospitality, financial services, and defense sectors—a level of enterprise traction unusual for a company exiting stealth. Decibel founding partner Jon Sakoda described the platform as a paradigm shift for cybersecurity teams defending against LLM-based attacks, according to Tech Funding News.
The funding arrives at a moment of acute tension in the enterprise security market. According to data published by Help Net Security, cybersecurity seed volume surpassed 1,000 deals for the first time since Q3 2023 in the final quarter of 2025, representing a 41 percent increase from post-pandemic lows. The global endpoint detection and response market is valued at approximately $7.23 billion in 2026 and is projected by Tech Funding News to reach $45.95 billion by 2034, growing at 26 percent annually. The catalyst driving that growth is the proliferation of AI agents inside enterprise networks—systems that execute tasks autonomously, behave like legitimate users, and are invisible to tools designed to flag malicious code signatures. As Ent noted in its launch materials, a coding agent with access to production systems is behaviorally indistinguishable from a developer doing real work.
The competitive implications for established endpoint security vendors—CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Microsoft Defender chief among them—are significant. Ent is not competing on marginal improvements to existing detection paradigms but is instead arguing, as Tech Funding News described, for a structural shift from detection to prevention as the organising principle of enterprise security. Whether that thesis can be proven at scale, and how incumbents respond with their own AI-native offerings, will determine whether Ent becomes a category-defining company or a well-funded challenger absorbed into an existing platform. The company plans to showcase its technology at Black Hat USA 2026 in Las Vegas in August, a venue where the scrutiny of the global security research community will provide the first serious public stress test of its claims.