Cognna

Cognna is a Saudi cybersecurity startup founded in 2022 by Ibrahim Alshamrani and Ziyad Alshehri. Its flagship product, Nexus, is an agentic AI Security Operations Center (SOC) platform that combines AI agents with human analysts ("Guardians") to deliver unified threat detection, investigation and response, offered either as SaaS or as a managed detection and response (MDR) service, with over 300 pre-built integrations into customers' existing security tools. The company positions itself as building solutions tailored to the cybersecurity challenges and regulatory requirements of the Middle East and North Africa region. Cognna raised a $2.25 million seed round in November 2023 led by Impact46, with participation from Vision Ventures and Faith Capital, and went on to raise a $9.2 million Series A round (reported December 2025) led by Impact46 and co-led by BNVT Capital, with participation from Vision Ventures and Tali Ventures, to fund global expansion; it has been described as the first cybersecurity startup in the Middle East to secure this kind of institutional investment.