Cantina has raised $8 million by pitching a platform that automates security response work after vulnerabilities are found. SiliconANGLE reported on July 30 that Framework Ventures led the investment.

Cantina is a startup founded by security researchers and engineers known for finding major software vulnerabilities and defending against attacks. It provides a platform that deploys AI agents across customer environments to automate investigation, prioritisation, remediation and remediation verification after vulnerabilities are discovered.

Cantina focuses not on detecting vulnerabilities but on post-processing. Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report showed that last year the main point of entry for breaches was vulnerability exploitation, overtaking stolen credentials as the biggest share. Among critical vulnerabilities known to have already been exploited, the share that was fully remediated was 26 percent, down from 38 percent a year earlier.

Cantina said the manual work afterward is a bigger burden than finding the vulnerability itself. It said people still often handle tasks directly, from identifying the owners of affected systems and judging whether there is actual risk to assigning a team to fix it and checking that changes have been applied.

At the core of Cantina's platform is a 'security memory layer' that continuously updates customer environments. It maps identity records, servers, code repositories, cloud permissions, databases holding customer data and the relationships among them. It then factors in system owners, dependencies, recent changes and past investigation results to decide which issues to address first.

Co-founder and CEO Hari Mulakal (하리 물라칼) said, "AI has greatly increased the speed of attacks." He said attackers can find vulnerabilities and build working exploits faster before defensive organisations respond, and existing security team workflows were designed before these changes.