7AI announced its first formal channel program Thursday as the startup seeks to scale through partners, building on strong demand for its agentic SOC platform. The debut follows the hiring of industry veteran Zachary Kilpatrick as senior vice president for global alliances in June.
Kilpatrick, formerly of Cribl and Okta, told the outlet that the program standardizes a “partner-first” strategy at the two-year-old company. 7AI has already sourced nearly half of its business through the channel, but the new structure aims to systematize those relationships. The program offers two tiers, deal registration, discounts, incumbency protection, and enablement. It also provides dedicated sales and technical resources.
The startup’s agentic SOC platform provides autonomous investigation of security alerts while deploying agents to perform other formerly manual tasks for analysts. The platform’s agents have overseen more than 7 million security investigations, according to the company. A key aim of the program is simplicity, Kilpatrick said.
“The days of these very large, convoluted partner programs are in the past,” he said. “Ultimately, partners care about solution value—what problems can you help me solve for my customers—whether or not that’s going to be profitable for me, and whether or not that’s going to be sticky in my customer accounts.”
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Partners will have a major opportunity to build services around the agentic SOC platform. This includes MSSPs incorporating the technology into managed security offerings or system integrators deploying it within projects for security operations modernization, Kilpatrick noted.
GuidePoint Security began collaborating with 7AI while the startup was still developing its initial technology. Mark Thornberry, senior vice president for partnerships at the Virginia-based firm, said the pace at which 7AI moved from idea to product to market was impressive. The partnership has since grown into delivering the technology to numerous customer accounts, with strong traction in recent quarters.
“There’s a huge appetite at GuidePoint to partner with them,” Thornberry said.
While the agentic SOC segment is crowded with players, it remains a high priority for many customers, Thornberry noted. “For most of our customers—if it’s not their primary pain point, it’s certainly one of them,” he said.
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Thornberry also praised the formalization of the partner program and the hiring of key channel leadership. It shows how rapidly the startup has been maturing on the partnership side, he said. “We’re very bullish on the partnership,” Thornberry added.
7AI was launched in 2024 by CEO Lior Div, a repeat entrepreneur in security who was formerly CEO and co-founder of Cybereason, and CTO Yonatan Striem-Amit, also formerly a Cybereason co-founder. In December 2025, the company raised a $130 million Series A funding round, led by Index Ventures. The round was the largest Series A in cybersecurity industry history at the time, according to 7AI.
Div told the outlet previously that the company has focused on the channel from the beginning. “The number [of deals] that the partners are generating is crazy,” he said in April. Even as a company so heavily built around AI, cutting out the partner is unthinkable, he said. “People need people. And the customer needs those trusted partners.”
