After 18 months of behind-the-scenes work, San Francisco-based startup Kenzo Security is emerging from stealth with a funding announcement and a new agentic AI security platform.
The raise amounted to $4.5 million and came from The General Partnership, a San Francisco venture capital group, and Michael Coates, former chief information security officer for Mozilla and X, then known as Twitter, according to a news release.
Kenzo Security’s founders are Harish Singh and Partha Naidu, individuals with experience in the U.S. military and security startups like Datadog and Lacework, respectively. The pair expect their new venture to transform security operations.
Unlike general-purpose AI models, the Kenzo platform is trained for specific security functions. When deployed on a mesh architecture, it can autonomously detect threats and conduct investigations, significantly reducing manual workload. This allows security teams to focus on higher-impact initiatives.
“Every security team is trying to figure out how to leverage AI, but most tools simply wrap LLMs around Tier 1 alert handling,” Harish Singh, Kenzo CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “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.”
According to the company, the new funding will help scale its headcount to 20 individuals, with specific focus on grow its engineering and sales teams.
