Tommy HayesSenior Associate
Why We Invested in DefensX: Securing Work Where It Actually Happens
Today we announced a growth investment in DefensX, a browser-native security platform that turns any browser into a zero-trust AI workspace. Our thesis is simple: the browser has become the center of modern work, security tooling has not kept pace, and nowhere is that gap wider than among the small and midsize businesses that drive the economy. DefensX was built to close it.
The Browser Security Gap
Over the past decade, work moved out of installed applications and corporate networks and into the browser. SaaS adoption, remote work, and now AI-assisted workflows mean the browser session is where sensitive data is created, shared, and, increasingly, compromised. Yet the security stack most companies run was architected for a different world: DNS filters, VPNs, and endpoint agents all enforce at the network or device layer, blind to the browser session where the real work happens. The results are predictable. Phishing pages sail past email filters, credentials get entered into spoofed sites rated safe, and employees paste customer records, source code, and sensitive data into AI tools without IT seeing a single prompt. It is about to get worse. Gartner expects 40% of enterprise applications to embed AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% a year earlier. The browser will soon be crowded with autonomous software acting at machine speed, with none of the oversight we apply to humans. As a result, the browser has become the single largest threat vector in the enterprise, and closing the gap between where risk lives and where controls sit is one of the most consequential problems in cybersecurity today.
Strategic acquirers have reached the same conclusion. In roughly two years, Palo Alto Networks acquired Talon, CrowdStrike acquired Seraphic, Zscaler acquired SquareX, and Akamai acquired LayerX, with incumbents paying premium valuations to enter the browser layer. But every one of those products was built for the large enterprise, and most require replacing Chrome or Edge with a proprietary browser. The businesses that need browser security most, the SMBs that attackers increasingly target as entry points into larger supply chains, have been left patching together legacy tools that were never designed for how they work today.
That is the gap DefensX fills. It delivers enterprise-grade protection, phishing defense, data loss prevention, AI governance, and zero-trust access, through a lightweight extension on the browsers employees already use, distributed by the MSPs that serve as outsourced IT and security teams for most SMBs. The platform was purpose-built for that channel from day one: true multi-tenant management, per-seat pricing with no minimums, and native marketplace billing. That is why it has become a staple of MSP marketplaces like Pax8 and Sherweb. Every single customer we spoke with said they would recommend the product without hesitation, and the results follow: sustained triple-digit year-over-year ARR growth alongside capital efficiency and profitability.
Partnering with DefensX
As my partner Nick Stoffregen, who joins the DefensX board as part of the investment, noted in the announcement: “DefensX has built a world-class product that customers love, especially as they look to establish AI guardrails within their organizations. We are thrilled to support the leadership team as they seek to deepen their reach with MSPs and cultivate direct sales to help thousands more companies establish zero-trust access to secure AI workspaces.”
This investment will fund the next phase of DefensX’s growth: expanding go-to-market and customer success capacity, deepening the channel-first model, and accelerating a product roadmap that already includes the newly launched AI Cloud Connector for securely isolating AI application traffic. We could not be more excited to partner with Osman, Murat, Andrew and the entire DefensX team.
For more information about the investment, read the company’s press release.