Hacker turned serial entrepreneur Sinan Eren is back in the cybersecurity business with Opnova, an early stage startup building technology to autonomously manage security workflows with limited direct human supervision.

Eren, who scored exits with Remotium (acquired by Avast) and Fyde (sold to Barracuda), has secured $3.75 million in pre-seed funding from Faber, ScaleX and Preface Ventures to work on modernizing and simplifying complex IT and security tasks with agentic AI technology.

Opnova and its backers are tapping into a growing market for AI-powered tooling to help operations teams deal with the weight of repetitive tasks that impact efficiency and increase the risk of errors and security problems. 

According to Eren, enterprise tasks as mundane as employee access requests can make up as much as 25% of IT service management requests, making the case for automation even stronger. 

His plan is to build Opnova’s agentic AI solution to offer intelligent reasoning and the ability to perform human-level tasks and reduce the manual workload on teams.

Eren said the Opnova platform will integrate seamlessly with existing workflows and is configurable to ensure that automation remains aligned with human oversight, particularly in highly regulated organizations.

“There is no interest to rip and replace existing tooling. We can extend solutions like Sailpoint, ServiceNow, Jira or even Tines to cover more tasks that were formerly not possible to automate. There are still a lot of applications lacking granular APIs or vendor hides APIs are behind the paywall of the most expensive tier,” Eren explained.

Eren said the idea is to address the “toil and rework” reality where new technologies meant to streamline operations often end up creating more repetitive and manual tasks. Despite the promises of solutions like SOAR  and IGA, he said a major “automation gap” remains where current automation solutions fall short due to a lack of proper integrations, limited APIs, and inefficient decision-making tools.

The answer, Opnova argues, lies in the use of agentic AI technology to go beyond traditional rule-based automation with the ability to  perceive its environment, adapt to it, make decisions, and take actions to accomplish tasks. 

“Think of it as an autonomous taxi navigating a bustling city, compared to traditional automation’s fixed-track train. This adaptability allows agentic AI to handle complex, dynamic environments where conventional automation falters,” Opnova said.

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