Tengu Labs is an AI design and security studio. One practitioner with twenty years in the trenches, building the tools he wished existed.
Tengu Labs exists because the security tools industry has a problem: most of it is built by product managers who have never run a pen test, written a detection rule, or sat in a SOC at 3 AM during an incident.
The result is software that looks great in a sales demo and falls apart on contact with reality. Dashboards over capability. Workflow theater over actual work. AI features bolted on for the keynote, with no path from the model's output to a detection that ships.
I've spent twenty years on the practitioner side of this. Police officer. Big-Four security consultant. SOC and threat intel lead at a Fortune 100. Security architecture and threat management at a multi-billion-dollar regulated insurance holding company. I've held a CISSP since the early days. I've built and led red teams, penetration testing services, vulnerability management programs, threat modeling practices, and detection engineering teams.
Every tool Tengu Labs ships is something I needed, didn't find done well, and built. Log Lens came from writing detections by hand for years and watching colleagues do the same. Fissure came from the seven open windows every web app assessment seems to require. Kryptonite came from threat modeling AI agents and finding the existing frameworks didn't cover the surface area.
The bet here is simple: tools built by someone who runs the work will solve more of the real problem than tools built by someone who's never run the work.
In Japanese folklore, the tengu (天狗) are mountain spirits — historically mistrusted as tricksters, but eventually recast as protector spirits and martial arts masters. They were said to be skilled in tactics, deeply knowledgeable about warfare, and dedicated to teaching their craft to those who proved worthy.
Tengu are also known for one thing above all: watchfulness. They see what others miss. They understand the terrain. They notice the intrusion before it lands.
That's the work. Security isn't about dashboards or noise — it's about watchfulness, terrain knowledge, and the discipline to act before the adversary does. Tengu Labs is named for that posture. Tools forged on the mountain. Sharpened in practice. Handed to operators who do the work.
Tools that ship in v0.7 and improve weekly beat tools that ship in v1.0 after eighteen months. Real users on real problems generate better feedback than internal design reviews.
The core capability is open source. Self-host it. Inspect it. Fork it. SaaS tiers exist for teams that want managed infrastructure and integrations — not for teams that want the capability gated behind a paywall.
Every AI output exposes its inputs, prompts, and rationale. You can see what the model saw. You can adjust what it weighed. You can override what it decided. The model is a colleague, not an oracle.
Insurance, financial services, healthcare — these are the environments where the work was done. Audit logging, data residency, separation of duties, and evidence trails are not bolt-ons. They're the foundation.
Start with Log Lens — free, 10 analyses per month, no credit card.