Ent Named 2026 Endpoint Security Innovation of the Year
By Janani Nagarajan|VP of Product Marketing When we launched Ent in June with $100 million in funding, we started with a simple premise: individual events on the endpoint no longer explain enough about risk.
A process can be trusted. A user can be authenticated. An application can be approved. An AI agent can have permission to access a file or invoke a tool. Each action may look normal on its own, even when the sequence becomes risky.
A few months after our launch, Ent has been named the 2026 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards winner for “Endpoint Security Innovation of the Year.” It is a great award as a company in recognition of the problem we set out to solve.
Risk increasingly looks like normal work
Traditional endpoint security is good at identifying malicious files, suspicious processes, and known indicators of compromise. Those controls remain important.
The gap appears when risky activity moves through trusted users, approved applications, browsers, SaaS platforms, and AI agents.
An employee may paste sensitive information into an AI assistant. An agent may use a person’s credentials to access files and invoke applications. A social engineering attack may convince a user to run a legitimate tool or command. A file may move through an approved service to the wrong destination.
These actions do not always look malicious at the process level. The risk becomes clearer when security teams can see who or what is acting, the data and applications involved, what happened before, and the goal behind the sequence.
That is the context Ent was built to provide.
Connecting activity into a sequence
Ent collects first-party telemetry directly from the endpoint and connects activity across people, AI agents, applications, browsers, content, workflows, and processes.
This gives security teams more than a list of events. They can see how the activity developed and understand whether it fits the user’s role, expected behavior, and organizational policy.
Ent uses that context to answer three questions:
- What is happening?
- Why is it happening?
- Should it continue?
Because telemetry collection, AI reasoning, and intervention can happen locally on the device, Ent can act while the activity is still underway. Security teams do not have to wait for separate logs to reach the cloud, reconstruct the sequence, and determine what happened after the fact.
Turning context into prevention
Understanding activity is useful when it changes the outcome. Ent uses sequence and intent to:
- Understand intent across users and AI agents, helping distinguish expected work from anomalous or malicious behavior.
- Prevent insider risk and data exfiltration by identifying risky movement of sensitive information through on-screen content, clipboard activity, and application workflows.
- Control unsanctioned applications and risky AI use before credentials or sensitive data are exposed.
- Interrupt last-mile attacks, including ClickFix, fake browser updates, and social engineering disguised as legitimate work.
The response depends on the context. Ent can allow an action, warn the user, request justification, guide the user to an approved workflow, or block the activity when the risk is clear.
What customers are already finding
In enterprise deployments, Ent has identified insider abuse missed by existing EDR and UEBA platforms. It has also interrupted DPRK-style remote-access abuse patterns in under 30 minutes.
These cases involve activity that can appear legitimate when viewed one event at a time. The user has access. The application is allowed. The individual process may not be malicious. The risk is visible in the sequence and the intent behind it.
What the recognition means
The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards evaluate entries based on innovation, performance, functionality, user experience, market impact, and value. The program covers categories including endpoint, cloud, identity, threat detection, and data security. For Ent, this award recognizes an approach to endpoint security built for the way people and AI agents now work. Security needs to connect activity into a sequence, understand the intent behind it, and intervene before legitimate-looking actions cause harm.
We are grateful to the customers, partners, and team who have helped us build and test this approach since launch.
Learn more about Ent’s approach to AI endpoint security.