Cantina Launches From Stealth Backed by $8 Million to Automate Security for the Age of Autonomous Attacks

Built by veteran security researchers, Cantina introduces autonomous security workers that identify security issues, drive remediation, and verify fixes before attackers act

NEW YORK, July 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cantina today announced it has launched from stealth backed by $8 million in funding led by Framework Ventures, bringing the company's total amount raised to $16.5 million. The company has built the first community-powered agentic security platform that helps organizations proactively find, prioritize, and remediate security issues at machine speed.

Cantina was founded by veteran security researchers and engineers who have spent years uncovering vulnerabilities and defending against attacks across some of the world's most critical software systems. They saw firsthand how AI was accelerating the speed and sophistication of attacks while forcing defenders to keep pace.

Today, Cantina helps organizations across healthcare, financial technology, and other regulated industries, from mid-market companies to Fortune 500 enterprises, automate security work before attackers get the chance to capitalize. The team also holds trusted access with OpenAI and participates in Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program, giving Cantina early visibility into the model capabilities reshaping both attack and defense.

The Cost of Attack Is Collapsing

For decades, many vulnerabilities went unexploited because finding them, understanding them, and building reliable exploits required significant time and expertise. AI has dramatically lowered the cost of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

According to the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, vulnerability exploitation overtook stolen credentials as the leading breach entry point for the first time in the report's 19-year history. Yet only 26 percent of critical known-exploited vulnerabilities were fully remediated last year, down from 38 percent. Half of ransomware victims also had credential exposure detected before the attack. Organizations increasingly know where their risks are but cannot resolve them before attackers move.

The problem is that finding vulnerabilities is only the beginning. Security teams still need to determine ownership, assess real risk, coordinate remediation across engineering teams, validate fixes, and confirm issues have actually been resolved. Most organizations still rely on human-driven workflows for this work, while thousands of security teams independently investigate the same vulnerabilities and build the same response playbooks instead of benefiting from what others have already learned.

"AI has dramatically accelerated the pace of attack," said Hari Mulackal, CEO and co-founder, Cantina. "Attackers can identify vulnerabilities, understand systems, and build exploits faster than ever before. Security teams cannot keep responding with workflows built for a pre-AI world. Defenders need AI that doesn't just identify problems, but helps investigate them, coordinate remediation, validate fixes, and continuously gets smarter with every issue it resolves."

Introducing the First Autonomous Security Workforce to Enable Security Teams

Cantina has built a platform that customers use to automate security work from discovery through remediation, using out-of-the-box agents, custom-built agents, and proven community-built agents shared by other Cantina customers.

The platform builds a living understanding of each customer's environment. It maps every entity across the environment and how they relate, whether that's an Okta user, a server, a GitHub repo, an AWS IAM role, or a database holding customer PII, then layers in the business context around them: who owns each system, what it supports, what has changed recently, and what past investigations have revealed. That shared context is how Cantina determines which issues demand immediate action, and it gives security teams a single, current picture of risk.

Every investigation teaches the platform more about the customer's environment, so Cantina gets more precise over time rather than starting from zero with every alert.

Rather than generating more findings, Cantina focuses on prioritizing issues that actually matter and helping organizations resolve them to the standard of a staff-level security engineer.

The platform helps organizations understand, prioritize, and remediate security risks across their environments, including:

• Security Memory Layer: Maintains a dynamic digital twin of the organization's cybersecurity, technology, and compliance environment, continuously mapping assets, identities, systems, and their relationships.
• Risk Prioritization: Identifies and ranks the security issues that pose the greatest business risk.
• Autonomous Remediation: Automates the investigation, coordination, and remediation workflows that traditionally consume security team resources.
• Verified Resolution: Confirms that fixes have been implemented successfully and maintains auditable evidence that risks have been resolved.

"Every security team I know can find problems faster than they can fix them. The backlog is where the risk lives," said Matt Mock, Chief Information Security Officer at Trend Health Partners. "Cantina is the first platform we have used that carries the work through from finding an issue to driving the fix, and it lets my team operate like one far larger than it is. We keep finding new uses for it across our security program."

About Cantina

Cantina is the community-powered agentic security workforce that helps organizations identify, prioritize, remediate, and verify security risks at machine speed. Built by veteran security researchers, Cantina combines autonomous security workers with a continuously evolving understanding of each customer's environment to automate security work from discovery through resolution.

For more information, visit https://www.cantina.security/ 

SOURCE Cantina