Tenex AI CEO Foster: MSSP Market ‘Ripe For Disruption’

Sarasota, Fla.-based Tenex, which just announced funding from storied venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and others, bills itself as an AI-powered security service provider that will partner with MSPs.

Eric Foster, former president of security services provider Cyderes and now co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence-powered services provider Tenex AI, says his new company wants to disrupt legacy providers ill-prepared for the AI revolution.

“Services companies, especially, are so ripe for disruption with artificial intelligence,” Foster told CRN in an interview. “I couldn't be more excited about this intersection of these technologies of AI and automation, and then how that can really improve security for the better.”

Sarasota, Fla.-based Tenex bills itself as an AI-powered security service provider that will partner with MSPs. The company has financial backing from storied venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Shield Capital and cybersecurity angel investors.

Tenex AI

Zane Lackey, general partner at Andreesen, told CRN in an email that the VC firm also known as a16z invested in Tenex in part for “its exceptional leadership team, innovative vision, and potential to transform their market” as well as a team “with a proven history of building and scaling multiple $100M+ sales organizations in the cybersecurity space.”

Asked about his thoughts on the IT channel, Lackey said the traditional model of reselling and integrating systems “is struggling to keep pace with modern IT demands.”

“As cloud-native architectures, AI, and cybersecurity challenges grow more complex, customers are looking for solutions that go beyond reselling products,” he said. “They need partners who can operationalize technology and deliver outcomes. The channel must shift from a transactional model to a solutions-oriented one. This requires expertise in managing complexity, leveraging AI, and aligning with enterprise goals. The future of the IT channel lies in partners that can act as strategic enablers, and Tenex exemplifies this transformation.”

Tenex’s flagship offering is a managed detection and response (MDR) service that combines Google Cloud security with AI models to maximize enterprises’ cloud security investments while improving cyber resilience.

“We’ve seen so many service providers try to bolt AI onto their solutions,” Foster said. “We've seen them try to say, ‘We're going to start with Google, too. But we're also going to work with these five other providers.’ And they just don't get it. It's not how Google wants to work with somebody. It's not what the customers want. They want specialists who focus on and understand the platform.”

Here’s more of what Foster had to say, edited for length and clarity.

What do you want people to know about Tenex?

I always like to use the Ferdinand Porsche (founder of carmaker Porsche) quote–the whole reason I got here, I looked around not seeing the car of my dreams, and I decided to build it myself. That's what led me to Cyderes. And we had an amazing run. We built an amazing company.

Got to get great exposure to Robert Herjavec (former Cyderes CEO and a panelist on TV reality show ‘Shark Tank’).

The experience, the expertise, the lessons learned, all of that, all comes together to create Tenex.

Services companies, especially, are so ripe for disruption with artificial intelligence. I couldn't be more excited about this intersection of these technologies of AI and automation, and then how that can really improve security for the better.

We've seen so many service providers go try to bolt AI onto their solutions. We've seen them try to say, ‘We're going to start with Google, too. But we're also going to work with these five other providers.’ And they just don't get it. It's not how Google wants to work with somebody. It's not what the customers want. They want specialists who focus on and understand the platform.

It's so sad to me how the VARs have forgotten what VAR was supposed to stand for. And we see so many that are just added resellers that don't actually add value.

The difference with Tenex is we're laser focused on making customers successful.

The literal business model is sharing the success with our customers. We believe we can be the most efficient MDR (managed detection and response) business in the history of MDRs, and then pass that savings on to our customers.

What are your goals for 2025?

We believe that the cloud service providers have already won the security platform war. A lot of people in the industry haven't realized it yet. But to me, the last decade of cybersecurity has proven that cybersecurity has a big data problem.

The next decade is going to prove that cybersecurity is an AI addressable problem … meaning that artificial intelligence can have a real significant material impact on the cybersecurity business.

The companies that own their own cloud and own their own AI stack are going to have such a material advantage in the next generation of security telemetry wars.

Microsoft and Google are leaps and head and shoulders above everybody else in what they're going to be able to deliver over the next decade. Tenex is coming out laser focused on the cloud service provider security stacks.

We're coming out of the gate 100 percent focused on Google because that's where our expertise is. That's where our history is.

Unfortunately, none of the legacy service providers are meeting the needs of the customers in this arena.

The market wants a go-to, amazing cybersecurity services provider that specializes in the cloud stack. And we're just seeing so much demand from customers on questions like, ‘How can we leverage AI? What is our AI story and strategy? How can you help us with that? We're betting on Google, betting on Microsoft–and how can you help us with that, with this level of expertise?’

The other big thing is–’How can you drive down the cost or drive up the efficiency?’ The budget challenges have never been higher. The threat ecosystem gets bigger. The threat landscape gets bigger. And yet the results have over time gotten worse and worse.

Tenex, backed by Andreessen, backed by Shield (Capital), backed by some of these great investors, the great team that we've assembled, we're truly setting out to try to change that.

How is Tenex differentiating itself?

I've always believed that innovation happens in small, nimbler companies.

(Legacy) companies get locked into, well, we've got all these customers, we've got all these people. We've got all these processes that are tied up back on this legacy technology, on this legacy way of doing things. If you are a managed service provider today, probably the right thing to do for your business would be to wipe everything clean, start over with a clean sheet of paper and build AI first, automation first, and change everything out. And yet, unfortunately, most companies can't do that.

It is such an incredible opportunity to be able to build a company with the incredible level of funding and support we have at this time in the market. Artificial intelligence has changed everything. It really, truly has. It's like the dawn of the early internet days.

The next decade or two decades are going to be such an incredible transformative opportunity for our industry that we really have such an advantage.

Does Tenex’s AI investment mean lower overhead?

We're paying people more but have a lot fewer of them. We expect an order of magnitude better performance because we're hiring the best of the best. And then what they're able to do with artificial intelligence–no exaggeration,my head of engineering was able to build something in a weekend with AI that (would take anyone else) … three months of coding and probably six months of work start to finish.

You talk about taking something that took us six months before that we did in a weekend with a Tenex engineer who's got Tenex AI tools on top of them. It's an incredible advantage.

Are you seeing customers adopt AI and security together?

We've got a Fortune 100 customer already … in a retail, consumer-facing industry. And they've made big bets on AI already.

They're spending tens of millions–maybe even hundreds of millions–of dollars on artificial intelligence to directly enable their business. And they're seeing real directed returns out of it.

And they had real clear security funding for leveraging AI and security. They literally called us … the moment we opened our doors.

At the other end of maturity, everybody's curious about it.

Even into the smaller and midsize companies, where they're asking the right questions–’How can we leverage artificial intelligence in our security program? How can we make ourselves more efficient and more effective? Should we be (using AI security tools), even?’ Because I don't believe everybody needs to immediately move their entire security program to security agents. But you should be asking the question.

How do you think about the market opportunity for Tenex?

Google and Microsoft alone … there's probably tens of billions (of dollars) of services market opportunity just on those two cloud service provider platforms alone. There's not enough companies out there to service this. We think we're stepping into an incredible market opportunity that needs our services.

We will do a lot of displacing of some of the legacy guys, too. Speaking as a three-time CISO (chief information security officer), it's so unfortunate to me that the vast majority of this industry, everybody's so just incredibly dissatisfied with. Managed security service providers have some of the lowest NPS (Net Promoter) scores of any vertical in services or software.

I will also say, there are some great MSSPs out there. There's some great regional guys. There are some great specific technology focused guys. But the market opportunity that we specifically saw is–I don't think there's anybody that's been great that's focused on the pure-play cloud service providers that's also built in the automation and AI age.

And nobody that's got the might of Andreessen Horowitz behind them, too.

What does Andreesen bring to the table for Tenex?

Ben Horowitz's book (‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’) … was like an operating manual. It was one of several for me at my previous company. I literally handed out copies to all of my initial employees.

I had such tremendous respect for the guys at Andreessen Horowitz … and the culture they've created, and the impact they've had on America.

They’ve made this big push into American dynamism, they call it. This concept of–we need to make a return to what has made America originally so successful. Small tech, they call it, versus big tech.

It so aligns to values that I've always had and shared that it's just so amazing to be working with them. And then, goes without saying, but working with the biggest and best has so many tremendous advantages.

Our individual general partner at Andreessen Horowitz … Zane Lackey, is just amazing. I had the opportunity to work with him in his previous startup (Signal Sciences, which Lackey co-founded in 2014 and which sold to Fastly in 2020) at Fishtech and Cyderes. I got to meet him then and have seen his meteoric rise.

There's a general belief right now that AI and automation-enabled services are going to be the new software-as-a-service. You can take a services organization and transform it to have the growth and the financial profile that used to be reserved for SaaS companies.

I do not think we're going to see artificial intelligence take the human out of the loop anytime soon. I like to use this phrase, ‘Human led but machine driven.’

(As an example), the military isn't looking at, ‘How can we have a team of 10 people fly one F-16 (fighter aircraft)? It's, ‘how can we have one operator command a fleet of 1,000 drones and bring that order of magnitude shift to the battlefield?’

It's the same thing with cybersecurity. It's not, ‘How do we scale the “Terminator” robots that are going to knock down the bad guys?’ It's, ‘How do we give a human exponentially more capabilities to move faster, to make less mistakes, to interact better with the systems?’

Just to give you an idea of the hyper growth that we have in mind, we've got essentially three physical locations for the company already in geographically distributed parts of the U.S. We will probably leave this year with four or five physical offices in different parts of the country.

Is Tenex going to acquire companies to grow?

My companies have grown in the past by acquisition and that's always something we’ll look at.

We're exceptionally well-capitalized with some of the biggest and best behind this. And I would say not nothing is off the table.

We can build the default service provider if you're working with a cloud service provider. And we think if we do that, we're going to be one of the fastest growing companies in the cybersecurity space.

What we set out from the beginning here to build, it wasn't just, we're going to be yet another in the sea of MSSPs. We're setting out to build the biggest and the best, the go-to option. If you're working with Google Cloud security, there would be no reason you call anybody else.

What do you think of the huge volume of security vendors out there?

Unfortunately, spending time as a CISO, there are some security products out there that are absolutely terrible. And there are some products that just have never delivered on promises.

And then there are some products that are just absolutely amazing, and have incredible ROI (return on investment). And so our view at Tenex is we want to bring those 10x technologies to market. But we are laser aligned on the cloud service providers as the go-to platform–where you're going to store your security telemetry, where you're going to take advantage of artificial intelligence. And then bringing in other solutions that I'm a really big fan of.

Companies like Doppel that are doing really well on external threats and social media and the brand side. Even companies that we all know really well like Wiz that have done such a great job in the cloud security space. We are partnered with those companies and bringing them to market as part of this.

One of the taglines that Andreesen actually gave me when we were pitching them on this is … you guys building the distribution engine for security innovation.

We are so focused on the last-mile delivery to the customer. That is the most important part. That's really what I care about. It's bringing better outcomes to the customers.