Backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Greylock, Cogent builds agentic systems to fight off escalating AI threats

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cogent Security today announced $42 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from existing investor Greylock Partners and Definition. Founders and executives from OpenAI, Abnormal Security, and Datadog invested personally. The financing brings Cogent’s total funding to $53 million, just six months after the company’s official launch.

Why Attackers Are Winning

In 2025, over 48,000 new software vulnerabilities known as CVEs were published. That’s 162 percent higher than five years ago. Every enterprise software system has them, and new ones appear constantly as code changes and new threats emerge. Meanwhile, the time needed for hackers to figure out how to exploit new vulnerabilities has collapsed.

Attackers and security teams now operate at completely different speeds. Hackers using AI begin probing enterprises for vulnerabilities minutes after they’re first published. Fixing one on the defensive side still takes days or weeks. Security teams hunt down system owners through outdated directories and Slack threads. Developers field tickets without knowing which systems are affected or why this particular issue matters more than the hundreds of others in their queue.

Security backlogs grow faster than teams can clear them. Banks, hospitals, retailers, manufacturers, energy companies—they all face the same problem.

Finding vulnerabilities isn’t the hard part. Modern scanning tools handle discovery. The hard part is everything after: figuring out who owns what, understanding real-world risk, coordinating fixes across teams, proving the work was completed. It’s slow. It’s manual. And the threats now move at machine speed.

“Security teams are drowning in coordination work: chasing down system owners, writing tickets, proving fixes happened. We built AI agents that handle that work end-to-end, so security teams can finally keep pace with attackers,” said Vineet Edupuganti, CEO and co-founder of Cogent.

Cogent Security: AI Agents That Automate Remediation

Traditional security tools stop at detection, surfacing findings and leaving humans to handle the rest. Cogent’s AI agents investigate vulnerabilities, determine system ownership, assess real-world risk based on the environment, and generate remediation steps ready for engineers to implement. The agents then track fixes through to verified completion. Customers using Cogent have reduced exposure windows for critical risks by an average of 97 percent.

Cogent is built for enterprise governance. Every agent action is traceable and reproducible. The platform integrates directly into existing security and engineering workflows and operates under configurable approval gates and policy enforcement. Organizations can deploy autonomous AI agents without sacrificing control, auditability, or human oversight.

CSC is the leading AI-driven consolidator in commerce, having acquired Backcountry.com and four other brands in the past year alone. “Given the pace of our M&A activity, Cogent is central to our cybersecurity strategy—autonomously managing risk without slowing us down so we can stay focused on deploying AI,” said Justin Yoshimura, CEO of CSC Generation. “Cogent has become a meaningful competitive advantage for us.”

The Team

Cogent was founded by operators who have spent their careers both finding vulnerabilities and fixing them. Co-founders Vineet Edupuganti (CEO) and Geng Sng (CTO) came from Abnormal Security. Vineet led product strategy for a product loved by security teams. Geng built the ML fraud detection system now protecting half of the Fortune 500. Co-founder Thanos Baskous led infrastructure at Coinbase, where he ran large-scale vulnerability remediation.

The team also includes AI researchers from Google DeepMind who helped develop the transformer architectures behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Investment and Company Traction

Since launching in July 2025, Cogent is already working with dozens of Fortune 1000 companies. With the new funding, Cogent plans to accelerate product development, expand enterprise deployments, and continue building agentic security systems designed for governed, trustworthy execution at scale.

“The enterprise security landscape has reached a clear inflection point. The volume of vulnerabilities has outpaced what traditional, human-driven coordination can handle,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “Cogent’s AI enables teams to accomplish five times more with the same resources. This represents a fundamental reset of what’s possible in security operations, and we’re proud to partner with this team as they continue to push the boundaries.”

“Cogent represents a new generation of security companies built natively for AI agents as first-class operators,” said Saam Motamedi, partner at Greylock Partners. “Vineet, Geng, and Thanos understand that securing AI agents requires a fundamentally new operating model, which allows them to move faster and deliver measurable customer value early. The technical depth of the team combined with that execution speed makes the customer signal impossible to ignore.”

About Cogent Security

Cogent is an applied AI lab building autonomous agents that close the execution gap in cybersecurity, the window between discovering vulnerabilities and actually fixing them. While attackers use AI to exploit flaws in minutes, defenders remain constrained by manual coordination that takes days or weeks. Cogent’s AI agents automate the time-intensive work of investigation, prioritization, and remediation, helping Fortune 500 companies achieve a 97 percent reduction in exposure windows for critical risks. Built by researchers and operators from Google DeepMind, Abnormal Security, and Coinbase, Cogent is backed by Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. Learn more at cogent.com.

SOURCE Cogent Security

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