What happened
COGNNA, a Saudi Arabia-based startup specializing in AI-powered security operations, has raised $9.2 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Impact46, with co-lead investor BNVT Capital and participation from Vision Ventures and Tali Ventures.
COGNNA, founded in 2022 by Ibrahim Alshamrani (CEO) and Ziyad Alshehri (CTO), offers an “Agentic SOC” platform that leverages AI-driven automation and human oversight to detect, analyze, and respond to threats in real time.
With the new funding, COGNNA plans to invest heavily in product development (particularly AI enhancements), expand its sales and marketing footprint beyond the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, grow its engineering and SOC teams, and build infrastructure to support global-scale operations.
Who is affected
- Enterprises and SMEs seeking scalable, AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions, especially organizations dealing with limited internal SOC capacity or struggling with alert overload.
- SOC teams and security operations staff who may benefit from automation to reduce manual triage work and reduce response times.
- The global cybersecurity market, particularly in MENA and emerging markets, as COGNNA aims to expand internationally and compete with established cybersecurity vendors.
Why CISOs should care
- The trend towards AI-led “Agentic SOC” platforms suggests a shift from reactive to proactive defense, a capability that can augment or even transform traditional SOC operations.
- For organizations with limited security staffing or high alert volume, solutions like COGNNA’s Nexus platform promise faster threat detection and response with lower operational overhead.
- As more AI-driven vendors emerge globally, CISOs must evaluate such platforms for their maturity, integration fit, and operational risk, including AI reliability, false positives/negatives, and human oversight. COGNNA’s growth may accelerate this broader market evolution.
3 Practical Actions for CISOs & Security Leaders
- Assess your alert fatigue and SOC throughput: If your team struggles to keep up with alert volume or spends too much time on triage, consider evaluating AI-led SOC platforms as supplements to existing tools.
- Pilot AI-driven threat detection carefully: Run a controlled pilot in a non-production environment to test detection accuracy, false-positive rate, and integration with existing tools/processes before wider deployment.
- Plan for hybrid human-AI workflows: Ensure that any AI-automated system still includes human oversight and clear escalation protocols; treat AI as an enhancer, not a silver bullet.