Security operations startup Kenzo raises $4.5M to expand AI-powered platform – News

Security operations startup Kenzo Security Inc. launched today with an announcement that it has raised $4.5 million in funding to grow its engineering and sales teams and expand its platform’s capabilities.

Kenzo was founded in 2024 by Harish Singh and Partha Naidu (pictured above), both cybersecurity veterans. Harish was previously a founder and founding engineer who worked at Lacework Inc. and E8 Security Inc., while Partha, a former U.S. Air Force cyber operations leader, later led security product development at Datadog Inc. and CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. The pair founded Kenzo, recognizing a need for a data-driven approach to security operations that goes beyond alert triage and addresses the real challenges security teams face daily.

The company’s core offering is a platform that deploys a network of domain-specific artificial intelligence agents that are trained to handle key functions within the security operations lifecycle. The agents collaborate autonomously on a data mesh that enables fast, deep and contextual analysis across an organization’s entire environment with minimal human input.

Kenzo’s platform utilizes a swarm of purpose-built AI agents, trained for specific security functions, that are deployed on a proprietary data mesh architecture. The methodology delivers deep collaboration across agents to deliver more consistent and accurate outcomes and deliver what security teams need most: meaningful risk reduction at large scale.

The company’s approach helps reduce risk by highlighting only the most critical threats, allowing security teams to focus on high-impact tasks, while AI takes care of investigations and decisions to eliminate alert fatigue and manual work. The result, the company says, is the ability to scale security operations without the need for additional headcount, maximizing impact and controlling costs.

“Every security team is trying to figure out how to leverage AI, but most tools simply wrap large language models around Tier 1 alert handling,” explains co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Singh. “Kenzo takes a fundamentally different approach. We’ve built a true platform — not a chatbot — powered by a swarm of specialized agents working together to investigate threats, deploy and tune detections, hunt proactively and prioritize response in real time.”

The seed round came from The General Partnership and Michael Coates, former chief information security officer of Mozilla and Twitter Inc.

“We invested in Kenzo because they’re solving a real pain point with real technical depth,” said Dan Portillo, co-founder and managing partner at The General Partnership. “The AI SOC Analyst is becoming a commodity. Kenzo’s data-driven, multi-agent approach is what security teams actually need to reduce risk at scale.”

Photo: Kenzo Security