Sarasota cybersecurity firm raises $250M in funding

A Sarasota cybersecurity firm has raised $250 million in Series B funding — a seismic haul in a community that's only recently embraced its status as a tech and startup hub.  

TENEX, which is building a headquarters at 2407 Bee Ridge Road, secured the capital in a funding round led by California-based Crosspoint Capital Partners. The company plans to use the infusion to accelerate its global expansion and scale its employee base.

The flagship product for TENEX is its managed detection and response service, developed from the ground-up, it says, using artificial intelligence. It helps organizations detect and handle cyber threats through AI agents that escalate issues to humans when necessary. Its funding has grown 318% year-over-year, according to a statement.

TENEX has around 100 employees, according to CEO Eric Foster, who previously told the Business Observer his goal was to reach 300 employees by the end of 2026. The company has offices in Sarasota, San Jose, Overland Park, Kansas and Phoenix with plans to open a global office in Europe as well

“We're still planning what specific headcount goals will look like post this raise being significantly larger than expected,” Foster says in an email to the Business Observer. “We'll be expanding faster in every direction than we'd originally planned.”

Previously, TENEX received $27 million in Series A funding in September 2025, which it said would use to hire up to 100 employees in Sarasota over the next couple of years. That funding round was also led by Crosspoint Capital Partners.

“TENEX has reimagined the managed security services industry and built something differentiated: an AI-native platform with elite human expertise to protect enterprises at scale,” Crosspoint Capital Partners Managing Partner Greg Clark says in a statement. “The company stops threats with the speed needed to defend an AI-enabled advisory and is delivering that value with an excellent financial model.”

TENEX’s platform allows for a threat response in under a minute, according to the statement.

"Most of the [managed detection and response] market is still trying to bolt AI onto architectures that were never designed for it,” Zach Sivertson, managing director at Crosspoint Capital Partners, says in the statement. “TENEX went back to first principles and built natively — and the growth shows what that difference means in the market. Enterprises are voting with their budgets, and we're proud to back the team that's earning that trust."

In addition to announcing its $250 million capital raise, TENEX has appointed Bashar Abouseido as its president. A veteran cybersecurity executive with more than two decades of enterprise leadership, Abouseido most recently served as senior vice president and chief security officer at Charles Schwab.