Amsterdam-based offensive security startup Hadrian has successfully closed a $40 million Series B funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $65 million since its inception. The fresh financial injection was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from a robust roster of existing investors, including HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital, and Oetker Ventures. <\/p>\n
The newly acquired capital will be strategically deployed to accelerate Hadrian\u2019s expansion across the European, Middle Eastern, and African (EMEA) markets, as well as the United States. Furthermore, the company plans to deepen its ongoing investments in its core engineering and research teams to maintain its competitive edge in the rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape.<\/p>\n
The funding milestone arrives at a critical juncture for the cybersecurity industry, where the asymmetry between attackers and defenders has reached a tipping point. Modern cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to locate and exploit digital vulnerabilities at machine speed, far outpacing the traditional, human-led methods that many enterprise security teams still rely on. Hadrian has positioned itself directly against this threat, offering an agentic offensive security platform designed to allow defenders to operate at the exact same velocity as automated adversaries.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2021 by a team of former ethical hackers\u2014Rogier Fischer, who serves as Chief Executive Officer, and Olivier Beg, who acts as Chief Hacking Officer\u2014alongside entrepreneur and Head of Business Development Maurice Clin, Hadrian was built to address fundamental inefficiencies in how organizations manage their external attack surfaces. The platform was engineered to develop AI-driven offensive security technology capable of continuously discovering, validating, and prioritizing externally exposed cyber risks by combining continuous exposure management with agentic penetration testing.<\/p>\n
According to Hadrian, the fundamental purpose of the platform is to resolve a glaring imbalance in manual pentesting and adversarial probing that has been exacerbated by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence by malicious actors. Attackers now move at machine speed, yet a significant portion of the corporate world remains heavily reliant on outdated methodologies. Industry data highlights that 87% of organizations still depend on traditional, manual penetration tests to secure their systems. <\/p>\n
However, manual pentesting struggles profoundly when it comes to separating genuine importance from administrative noise. Security analysts note that only 0.47% of vulnerability scanner findings are genuinely exploitable in the wild. Consequently, traditional workflows force security teams to waste countless hours chasing phantom threats, with roughly 99.5% of the alerts they focus on requiring no actual remediation. This overwhelming volume of false positives creates critical blind spots that sophisticated attackers can easily slip through.<\/p>\n
Rogier Fischer, co-founder and CEO of Hadrian, emphasizes that while everyone in the industry recognizes how artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the threat landscape, many organizations are looking for solutions in the wrong places. He points out that while AI could potentially hold the answer to modern security woes, most people are currently focused on automating the wrong bits of the security lifecycle. <\/p>\n
Fischer notes that his team has been working with large language models since well before they went mainstream, giving them deep insight into the fact that artificial intelligence can operate at speeds exponentially faster than any human offensive security team ever could. By recognizing this reality, Hadrian set out to build a platform that emulates the actual attack paths utilized by modern hackers, thereby helping corporate customers understand their most critical risks and prioritize their limited security resources appropriately.<\/p>\n
Hadrian provides an AI-native offensive security platform that encompasses a comprehensive suite of capabilities, categorized into discovery, validation, prioritization, and remediation. Within this ecosystem, two primary components drive the platform’s operational efficiency: Atlas and Nova.<\/p>\n
Atlas functions as the continuous mapping engine for an organization\u2019s external attack surface. It operates around the clock, utilizing specialized AI agents to validate which discovered exposures are genuinely exploitable by external threats. Complementing Atlas is Nova, a module that provides on-demand agentic pentesting. Together, these systems emulate the tactical behavior of human hackers, probing for vulnerable pathways with the same machine speed harnessed by today\u2019s AI-assisted attackers. <\/p>\n
The platform offers always-on discovery, validation, and mobilization of an organization\u2019s most critical cyber risks, while autonomously verifying whether remediation efforts have been successfully implemented by internal IT teams. By shifting the paradigm from periodic, manual audits to continuous, automated adversarial simulation, Hadrian enables organizations to maintain a real-time posture against evolving threats.<\/p>\n
The real-world impact of this automated approach is substantiated by internal metrics shared by the company. Hadrian claims that its customers have achieved ten times greater visibility into critical risks across their digital estates, experienced a five-fold improvement in return on investment compared to traditional manual pentests, and reduced their time to resolution for critical vulnerabilities by an impressive 80%. <\/p>\n
Despite the heavy reliance on automation, Hadrian stresses that human expertise remains a foundational element of its architecture. The system is intentionally designed to maintain human oversight where it matters most, ensuring that people remain in the loop for critical strategic decisions. Humans set the mission parameters and make the decisions that require contextual business judgment, while artificial intelligence handles the heavy lifting in between, providing the continuous coverage, relentless repetition, and speed that no human team can possibly sustain around the clock.<\/p>\n
This launch and subsequent funding round place Hadrian alongside a growing cohort of venture-backed startups addressing the automation of offensive security and penetration testing. Recent market activity highlights robust investor appetite in this specific vertical, underscored by notable funding rounds for peer companies such as A Security, which raised $37 million for its autonomous offensive security platform; XBOW, which secured $35 million; Escape, which closed an $18 million round to automate API and application pentesting; and Tenzai, which recently captured $7.5 million in seed funding to build out its own AI-powered pentesting platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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