Appointment
Tenzai reunites Guardicore veterans as it expands leadership team
Nathan Perdue joins as chief revenue officer and Ilan Stern as chief people officer as the AI cybersecurity company scales its commercial operations and reconnects with former Guardicore leadership.
Tenzai is turning again to familiar faces as it moves from early development into a more commercial phase, appointing two senior executives who previously worked alongside its founders at Guardicore, the Israeli cybersecurity company later acquired by Akamai.
The AI-native cybersecurity company announced the appointment of Nathan Perdue as chief revenue officer and Ilan Stern as chief people officer, as it looks to scale its go-to-market and hiring operations amid rising enterprise demand for continuous security testing.
Both appointments carry a notable element of continuity. Perdue and Stern previously worked at Guardicore, the company co-founded by Tenzai’s founding team.
Perdue, who recently left his role as Senior Vice President, Global Security Sales, at Akamai, will lead global revenue strategy and sales expansion. Stern, who joined the company in February, arrived from Insight Partners, where he served as senior vice president of people.
The hiring push comes as Tenzai attempts to position itself in a cybersecurity segment that is undergoing structural change. The company develops what it calls autonomous “AI hackers” designed to simulate real attackers, probe systems continuously, and identify vulnerabilities in code and infrastructure.
The company’s commercial expansion follows a large Seed financing round last November, when it raised $75 million led by Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners and Lux Capital. At the time, co-founder and CEO Pavel Gurvich said the company was targeting what he described as a structural imbalance in cybersecurity spending.
Tenzai was founded in May 2025 by Gurvich, Ariel Zeitlin, Ofri Ziv, Itamar Tal, and Aner Mazur. Gurvich and Zeitlin previously co-founded Guardicore, with Ziv and Tal as part of the company’s founding team. Guardicore was acquired by Akamai in 2021 for $600 million.
