Seeing Without Being Seen: Why We Invested in Tenna Systems

Here’s something that sounds like fiction but is very much reality: Avner Bendheim, Tenna’s co-founder and CEO, had to reschedule our final investment meeting because he was operationally deployed in an elite IDF unit somewhere in the Middle East. 

That moment crystallized everything we look for in a founder and a company. Technical excellence? Check. Operational courage? Absolutely. Market validation in the most demanding environment possible? You can’t get more real than that.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce our investment in Tenna Systems, a company building electromagnetic spectrum awareness software that’s already been battle-tested in some of the most contested environments on earth.

This investment builds on our deep expertise in national security through Vannevar Labs, Cape Mobile, Hidden Level, Auterion, Muon Space, Kepler Communications and others. Tenna combines everything we look for: exceptional founders with earned insights and unmatched operational credibility, a software-native approach enabling rapid deployment, strong early traction with key defense customers, and a clear path to becoming foundational infrastructure.

The Invisible Battlefield

As long-term investors in national security, we’ve seen the role that electronic warfare has played in Ukraine and beyond, especially through our investments in Auterion and Hidden Level. And we’ve seen that electronic warfare has evolved from a specialized capability to an everyday necessity. It helps the good guys see threats, plan operations and – maybe most critically—avoid being detected themselves.

But here’s what many people miss: electronic warfare is a constant, grey zone tactic in use every minute of every day, even where there’s no active fighting. The electromagnetic spectrum has become crucial to modern warfare: communication, operations, drones, and munitions. As the RF environment grows denser and more contested, awareness of spoofing, jamming, and interference becomes mission-critical. Defense organizations worldwide are responding with increased investment in spectrum awareness and protection.

The strategic competition in the Pacific theater is even more complex, as it involves maritime operations across enormous ocean expanses with fundamentally different geography. No one sensor will solve every problem in every environment. So success requires the ability to synthesize data from a broader set of sensors: both existing exquisite systems and new, less expensive, attritable sensors – both fixed and mobile – deployed across air, land, sea, and satellite.

As defense departments move from fragmented RF monitoring to unified spectrum awareness, Tenna is positioned to become the central integration point across air, land, sea, and space. With increasing emphasis on modular, open architectures, Tenna is building a vendor-neutral, plug-and-play capability that becomes foundational infrastructure.

Their approach is so powerful in part because it’s fundamentally software-driven and hardware-agnostic. Tenna’s modular platform ingests commercial and tactical RF data from existing devices (e.g. cell phones, satellites) to generate a comprehensive picture of the electromagnetic environment in real-time.

And its applications extend well beyond defense. As autonomy, IoT, and critical infrastructure become more spectrum-reliant, Tenna will be a foundational layer for broader connectivity risk intelligence in civil aviation, public safety, and critical infrastructure protection.

A Team Forged in Real Operations

Tenna’s founding team brings exactly the combination of operational expertise and technical depth this problem demands.

Having spent 17 years in the Israeli Air Force leading SIGINT and space programs, Avner has unique experience fielding this capability in a live environment – hard-won knowledge of what actually works when lives are on the line. His leadership has given Tenna strong product direction, early momentum with Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and credibility within both the Israeli and U.S. defense ecosystems that would take any other startup a decade to build.

His co-founder (and twin brother), COO Gabriel Bendheim, brings operational expertise leading RF sensing capabilities in a Special Forces unit (which the Netflix show Fauda is based on), plus operations and sales leadership experience for tactical RF cyber companies, including D-Fend Solutions.

Their third co-founder, CTO Ronen Shatz, is a 30 year SIGINT leader and award-winning former CTO for electronic intelligence at IAI, one of the world’s largest aerospace defense companies. He adds a unique ability to interpret diverse signals, synthesize complex data, and model the environment. 

Tenna's team has lived electronic warfare and built it at scale. They are now bringing that capability to customers across the western democratic world who desperately need it.

Battle-Tested and Accelerating

Tenna is at the center of a transformation in modern warfare, with real customers using its product in the most demanding environments imaginable. Tenna is actively engaged with the U.S. Army, Air Force, and other federal defense agencies to advance spectrum intelligence capabilities for wireless systems, as well as operational deployments with electronic warfare and SIGINT units in allied defense forces.

Since we invested, their momentum has accelerated, especially with the addition of Mark Monahan to lead their U.S. federal business—exactly the go-to-market expertise needed to navigate the Department of Defense.

To the entire Tenna team: We couldn’t be more excited to lead your Seed round and partner with you as you build the future of spectrum Intelligence for modern electronic warfare.

The invisible battlefield is here. Tenna is making sure the right people can see it.